Crazy Enough (4 page)

I gave up my attempt at potty-humor-as-distraction when I saw and smelled what sat in our bowls.

We all stared at Mom who floated into her chair. She made yummy noises as she pulled her bowl towards her and started to eat. She wasn't using a regular spoon, she held on to the long orange plastic one she had used to stir and serve the gloppy food into our bowls.

Her nerves and muscles seemed to jog inside her body, making her head, arms, and torso nod rhythmically as she sat, aiming the huge spoon at her mouth, barely managing to feed herself. She looked like a toddler pretending to eat imaginary food with toy utensils and a severe lack of coordination, without a whiff of embarrassment. The table was quiet except for Mom humming and gurgling and a rhythmic thudding of her leg hammering lightly on its heel.

I mouthed the words “don't eat it” to Daphne.

“Mom,” John said finally.

“Ye-hessh, shweetie?” she said to something about four feet over John's head.

“What is this?”

“It's shicken mush! Who-ooo wants mo-ooore?” Then half asleep on her feet, she drifted in a zigzag path back to the stove to refill her bowl.

Daphne and Henry stared quietly at their food. John got up from the table and trotted upstairs. “Why is it
blue
?” I asked, trying to sound tough and accusing, but it came out as an embarrassed whine.

I didn't see any chicken anywhere in the frothy, teal colored gruel that sat in my bowl like a wet, poisonous frog. It was lumpy and foamy and had a bleachy smell. Mom had slurped a whole bowl of it into herself, and was scraping out the saucepan for the rest. John came back to the table, gave Henry some money, and told us all to go get a pizza. Then he took off out the door to get our dad, who was at school a football field away. Henry, Daphne, and I didn't talk about what we had seen as we walked downtown, but I wondered what Daphne was going to tell her family when they asked, “How was dinner?”

Later, back at home, I saw my mom being walked into an ambulance with Dad behind her carrying her little blue suitcase.

Shicken mush. It turns out, after they had pumped her stomach, there really was chicken in it after all. There was chicken soup, oatmeal, and Calgonite dishwashing powder.

I loved my mom more than anything. She was a cross between Grace Kelly and Sandy Duncan, but with two good eyes. When I was little I knew she was the most beautiful woman in the whole world. To me she looked like a Disney princess, a magical lady that birds and baby deer would follow around, eating out of her hand. Not an elegant lady
about town, more a pretty, pixielike girlie girl. I had no idea that a lot of people in our sleepy little town thought she was . . . odd.

As I got older, I started to notice eyes rolling her way. My mom was bright and chatty—a chime-in-loudly-on-any-conversation type person—but it turned out that was a social no-no for the prep-school set. Plus, she was a mere twenty-two when she and my dad took up residence at St. Mark's School.

My dad always comments on his lucky break in landing a job at St. Mark's. When he was done with his tour of duty in the Marine Corps in 1965, he went to his alma mater, Princeton University, to meet with the woman in charge of placing graduates into their ideal employment situations. She asked him where he wanted to live, what did he want to teach, and would he also like to coach football? Then, she handed him a piece of paper with a name, phone number, and an address. In July of that same year, Dad, Mom, and three-year-old John moved from my grandparents' farm in Pennsylvania, to St. Mark's School, in Southborough, Massachusetts, where Dad would teach, coach, and mentor, nonstop, for forty-five years.

Friends referred to them as “the golden couple.” My dad, an Ivy League, ex-Marine lieutenant, was manly handsome. He stood a healthy six foot one, one blue eye, one green eye, with jet-black Superman hair. My mom looked like a giggling tow-headed fairy that could pirouette across a field of buttercups and not bruise a single one.

I think some of the older, dumpier ladies around school took my mom's youthful sparkle as the antics of someone who thought a bit too much of herself. Most of the faculty wives at St. Mark's were bookish and preppy, embracing a more matronly aesthetic. Think lots of brown wool skirts with pale ankles dumping into squeaky duck boots. My mom stood out. Stood out like a slice of summer sun beaming into a punishing cold January. She twinkled in complete
contrast to those dour prep-school hens, and they did not care for it at all. Within the stiff, Tudor walls of St. Mark's, if you stood out, or thought you were special in any way, you were on your own . . . a lesson I learned for myself years later.

I remember witnessing affectionate moments between my parents, even though things would soon get to the point when it became hard to imagine them even in the same room together without getting a stomachache. But they loved each other long enough to get pregnant three more times after John.

Mom always had trouble with her girl parts, she'd say. Her pregnancies and her periods were rough going, but her miscarriage nearly did us both in. She was four months or so along when she lost the baby, and it knocked her out for awhile. Mom was twenty-six, John was five, Henry was two, and the doctors recommended a hysterectomy. They told my parents that Mom's endometriosis wasn't going to get any better, and since they already had two healthy boys . . . But Mom wouldn't hear of it. She wanted a baby girl. She promised to have the surgery, as soon as she had a girl.

Mom loved telling me, and anyone in earshot, how I nearly killed her, but June 25, 1969, twenty-four hours of labor and one blood transfusion later, she got her little girl and all the terrible tales of woe that would come with me. Yay! You're welcome, Ma!

When I was around six months old, the doctors finally got to melon ball her reproductive system. And, supposedly, that was just the ticket, until she started trying to kill herself.

Before Mom had any official diagnosis that I knew of, it was just, “Mom's tired.” It would go like this: We all came flying in from school in a blur of noise and book bags. My brothers were usually caked with mud from sports or brawling, while I would be covered in paint with some huge piece of construction paper with leaves or some other
crap glued all over it. We would barrel into the house and stop short at the sight of Dad by himself or one of our rotation of babysitters. “Where's Mom?” one of us would ask.

“She's resting.”

“Resting where?”

“At the hospital.” And that would be the end of the conversation.

The whole “tired” explanation made sense for awhile, because right before she would disappear she would usually seem . . . well . . . tired. She'd either be in bed for days and days, or she would move sleepily, and appear brittle and frail. She would stare at her food, out a window, or at one of us. She would get all weepy, and then, she'd just be gone.

I
loved
hospitals in the beginning. Mom was my favorite human being on the planet, so when she was in the hospital, well, that was the place to be! Plus, visiting Mom was like a big family outing. My dad, brothers, and I would pile into “Sunshine,” the yellow Volvo, and off we would go. We'd usually stop at a drugstore to buy her some smokes or some candy or her favorite perfume: “Muguet,” a soapy, lily-of-the-valley scent my mom absolutely soaked herself in.

Sometimes, my dad would give us a couple of bucks each to buy her a present, if it was a special occasion like her birthday, or Mother's Day. I'm pretty sure every single Mother's Day of my childhood was spent in some smoke- and psycho-filled hospital common room. Now that I think of it, pretty much the same goes for any holiday,
our
birthdays, Easter, Arbor Day, but if it was Mother's Day, we were definitely headed for this or that hospital with sparkly drugstore presents.

We would all crowd around her, in her room or the common room. I would tell her about something stupid the cat did, sing her songs, and make friends with all the doctors and hospital people. Mom
was in so many different hospitals for the first ten years of my life that some of the details blur together. For example, in the seventies, there was a common theme among all hospital common rooms. They stunk, for one. No amount of weapons-grade disinfectant could combat the stench of terrible coffee, pharmaceutical BO, despair, and about nine gajillion cigarettes. Those people
smoked.
In pretty much every hospital common room I ever saw, the walls, windows, and ceilings were slathered with tobacco sludge.

There would also be, without fail, a ping-pong table. I played more fucking ping-pong as a kid in more hospital common rooms, that when I so much as
hear
the
ker-plip-ker-plop
of the game, my stomach drops.

In general, something about seventies aesthetics were creepy even
in
the seventies. Even when grownups were growing their Chewbacca pubes and rapist mustaches, yanking up their camel-toe spandex to go roller skating around to key parties, I think even while the times swung, the people in it were creeped out by their own sepia-toned pre-Reagan-era, Polaroid existence.

Regardless of bad taste and smelliness, if Mom was
resting
in any hospital, when it was time to see her, I was into it. When she would finally come home from the hospital? That was just emotional mayhem and the best! thing! ever!

The second she got home with her little blue suitcase and plastic name bracelet, I would squeal, do a little dance, and be a tiny fireworks display of embarrassing little girlness. I would have a ream of pictures, fists full of whatever flowers were around, and have planned exactly what song I would sing for her, all the sentimental little things I wanted to share with her all planned in my head. She was gonna laugh, cry, and be so glad to be home that I wouldn't have to worry about her leaving anymore.

That was my movie. As the uplifting music would swell, the scene would fade to black, as the little girl and her mother would be holding hands, walking away from the camera, and toward the house as the sun went down, thus signifying completion of a trial or difficult period.

It wasn't until I was five when I realized that Mom and I were watching very different movies.

I remember one time when Mom had just gotten home from a substantial absence, about two months. But home again, home again, jiggety jig. There she was, sitting on her bed with the green bedspread, her powder-blue suitcase at her tiny feet.

She looked exhausted.

I remember I hugged her where she sat with my arms around her tiny waist, my head in her lap, and I looked up at her.

“Are you home forever?”

“Forever and a day,” she said, stroking my hair.

Panic. What does
that
mean?

“Just a day?”

“Forever
and
a day.” She was tired, but I could hear a tiny shred of amusement in her voice. Still confused, she's using
day
and
forever
in the same sentence. If she's home forever, days don't matter, right?

“Just a day?” I said quietly into her boobs. I didn't get it. I wanted her to just say
yes, sweetie, I'm not going to the hospital anymore, I will be here for breakfast and when you get home from school, we can watch television, and we can get married.
It wasn't hard to promise forever; I did it all the time. All she had to do was stay home.

She didn't say anything but I could tell she was looking at my dad while she stroked my head.

Turns out, forever and a day equaled about a week and some change before she was gone again.

I came flying in from school screeching for Mom to show her the marvelous ashtray I had made
and
glazed, myself, just for her, because my love for her was so amazing. I found, instead, the broad back of my father, as he hunched over the sink washing dishes.

“Where's Mom?”

“She's resting.”

“Resting where?”

“At the hospital.”

“
Why can't she rest here?
” I yelled at his back.

I couldn't help it. I had been promised forever and a series of days after that. We were going to be together every day for the rest of our lives. She was going to smoke and use this unbelievable ashtray and love me so much more than God knows what, forever.

My dad said nothing, but his body visibly cringed and tightened against my tiny air raid siren. He sighed into the sink.