Crazy Enough (7 page)

But asshole or not, Lovey was a doctor. He wore the white coat and name tag and had that chilly white voice we were so used to hearing. All swoop-y with pretend caring. He was clearly a medical authority, a grown-up, so I believed him.

I was going to be just like her. And everyone said so.

The next time that Mom got sent to Sadville was the summer my brother John and I seriously considered killing her. I was eleven and all summer the universe conspired to take my childhood and give it to that little blonde. She was so greedy, mewling for our love and attention, taking it, then turning around and telling anyone in earshot that we hated her. Dad had pretty much washed his hands of the whole thing, and nobody blamed him. He worked so hard only to give every penny to this or that institution or pharmacy, each promising to bring his wife, life, and sunshine back. All it seemed to do, though, was embolden all the stupid doctors to make more and more ridiculous diagnoses and write dopier prescriptions, some that would make my mom weave and wobble in her body like a cartoon chicken on a unicycle. Each doctor acted as though they had all the answers, and every single one was wrong. It was as if they were all horny to find more stuff wrong with her, and keep her sick and medicated.

After many sad and frustrating years of that, Dad checked out. He worked all school year, teaching history and coaching, then in 1980, took a summer job as a lifeguard at a water park near Little Boar's Head, or Boarsie, a town near Rye, New Hampshire. He and his dog Tilly could live all summer at the beach and have a nice, ninety-odd miles between himself and reality. Henry was off at awesome American camp. John and I stayed home, smoked pot, and grew thick calluses all over our hearts. John had his license now, and that meant we had Mom duty.

Mom duty basically involved us going to the hospital, bringing her a carton of Kool Milds, chocolate-covered cherries, and clean underpants.

“Something's gotta give,” we would say every time we left. “She's gotta go.” We weren't complete bastards, but Mom clearly wanted out, so why not give her a hand? We were mostly kidding when we joked about putting a hit on her or going through the phone book to find Mafia-sounding names. Callous humor was the only thing that made the crazy tolerable. Whenever we'd hear an ambulance siren blaring by we'd say, “There goes Mom.” when someone asked what our parents did for a living we'd say, “Our dad works but our mom is broken.”

It was a long, hot summer with varying degrees of horrible after each hospital visit. There was always some new drama with one of her new pyromaniac rapist friends, or Dr. Lovey would be changing her medication and she would be a complete mess. She would rattle her pink plastic pill dispenser, like a doll's ice cube tray, embossed with M T W T F S S for the days of the week, and say, “Lovey is
taking me off all my meds. I'm better now that we know what's wrong! See? No more pills! I'm only taking this one for voices, this one for shaking, this one for sleepy-sleepy-nye-nye and this one . . .”

One of the last times I saw my mom in that hospital was a blazing late-August afternoon. John and I pulled up to Sadville, armed to the teeth with her smokes, clean underpants, and loads of sarcasm. The air was smudged with humidity, wavering a couple feet above the ground, blurring the edges of everything. A great day to be slathered in Bain De Soleil and flirt with the tattooed carnies at my dad's water park, or just run into some cold water, like kids were doing everywhere else that day.

Instead, we walked up the cement steps into the main office to sign in and wait for Nursezilla to come grunt us up to our mom's floor. When we said Large to the sign-in nurse she looked on a clipboard and quickly sat up very straight, smiled phonily and awfully, and said, “Um . . . yes. Could you please wait over there for a moment? Someone will be here soon, to talk with you.”

To
talk
with us?

John went stone quiet. His face was stiff under his long rock 'n' roll hair.

We sat on the sofa across from the front desk, the sign-in nurse smiling nervously if she caught us looking her way. She busied herself with some papers and kept her head down.

John and I stared blankly forward.

“She's dead. She fucking did it. She's dead,” I said out loud, not looking at him. I knew full well my big brother had already come to that conclusion. What I wondered was, did we make this happen? Does
John
think we made it happen?

I was immediately ashamed of myself. All the joking . . . I felt like a bully who had terrorized a little dog and then watched it sprint
into oncoming traffic. A tiny living being, so twisted and miserable from God knows what, but all she wanted in the whole world was to be loved. And one by one, all the loved ones in her life gave up on her and pulled away. Including her children. My faced burned. I wanted her to die, and now . . .

“Hi there,” someone was singing at us. “You must be Stor-meee!”

I looked up to see a middle-aged woman in a pink pantsuit standing in an office doorway. John and I were pulled from our reverie and beckoned into a bright office, blasted with air conditioning. I instantly had gooseflesh all over my arms and legs. We sat on one side of a massive desk, she on the other. A plaque on the desk read Dr. Candy Something-ski.

“So, how are you kids doing?”

Next to her name plaque was a menagerie of ceramic Siamese kittens, frozen and shiny. They were posed to look like they were suspended in midplay. All around the room were the trappings of someone who had to bullshit families as their primary source of income. On the walls were framed posters of soft-focus vistas, those typical shots of seascapes and rainbows with birds stretching across them. Some had motivational phrases about footsteps and paths and shit. There were other glass critters here and there, all peeking their heads around, giving the impression that they were all paying attention. Like they cared.

I wanted to smash everything I saw.

Dr. Candy opened her mouth to sing again, this time to my brother who just stared at his thumbs.

“Is she dead?” My voice did not sound as tough as I'd hoped.

An expression twitched over her before the cough-syrup smile of gigantic fake empathy returned. The look that lit for a nanosecond on her face was a cold, sharky indifference with a barb of “I've heard
about you, you mouthy little fucker, don't interrupt me again or you'll be frozen in glass faster that you can read the motivational messages on my wall.”

I could feel the bitch, and she hated me. Fuck her.

“Is. She. Dead?” I refused to look at her, staring at the tiny ball of yarn in the grip of the tiny ceramic cat whose tiny butt pointed up. Someone thought it a good idea to paint a tiny butthole under its upturned tail.

“Suzi's had a bad day.” She turned her lollipop charm back on me, talking at me as if I weren't real. I looked at John, then at his thumbs as he didn't lift his eyes, then back to the ceramic kitty butthole. “And it seems she's been trying to hurt herself, and,
and . . .”

“We know she wants to fucking die already, that's why she's here. Do we need to identify her body or sign something, because I have to get the fuck out of here, okay?””

I jumped to my feet, swatting the little animals off the desk and onto the floor.

“Not dead,” said the candy-coated Disney bitch without singing.

She tried to regain her cough-syrup tone, saying that Mom was okay but we could not see her. She offered us no condolences or details. As we got up to leave, she told us someone from the hospital would let us know when it was okay to come back and visit. My brother thanked her, I think. But his voice was so low that he could've said “Fuck you, lady.” And made it sound like thanks. John was so cool. I was not. I made sure my feet crunched over the bits of porcelain kitty heads and snapped little paws on my way out.

We found out, later, that Mom had smashed her lily-of-the-valley perfume bottle in the sink and carved herself up pretty good with a shard. She probably had no idea we had even come that day, as she
lay somewhere wearing gauze opera gloves, barely able to form a sentence from all the drugs they pumped her with.

I tried so hard to
be
hard. To not care, make no big deal, and be tough. My brothers could do it, but me? I sucked at not caring.

My dad was the best at looking tough. He told me his secret, once. We were in the car heading back to Southborough from Boarsie. It had been a glorious day of sun and ocean. As the afternoon crept into a warm, orange evening, we all enjoyed an impromptu clambake, with my brothers and I, Dad's parents and family, all my cousins, extended summer friends, dogs, and Frisbees. We all stuffed ourselves with clams, lobster, and buttered heaps of corn on the cob. The grownups smoked and drank beer and the kids ran amok in the cooling sand.

My brothers had stayed behind, and Dad brought me with him as he went back for some Mom-related crisis. I sat in the front seat with my sand-sticky feet on the dash, staring hard out the passenger side window. I didn't want Dad to see my face, crumpling around my stupid, indulgent tear ducts. We were rolling under passing streetlights on our way to I-95, and I didn't want him to know I was crying. Crying was weak.

My throat was tight and big fat tears welled behind my lids. I tried to do the tough thing, the correct thing, and quickly wipe anything that fell from my lashes. I guess only a dumb kid would think holding one's breath and wiping each eye every three seconds while staring ferociously out the window wouldn't betray the truth.

“What is it?” my dad asked sweetly. Of course, it made me cry harder. I strained every facial muscle I had, trying to stop the tears. I folded my arms tighter and higher and shook my head quickly.

“In a minute,” I tried to say, but my voice was that gapping, breathy, crying girl voice. Mom's voice. I was so embarrassed. I was
scared that Dad might get angry if he knew what I was thinking. As soon as we were on the dark highway, headed south, my breathing smoothed out and I could talk without sounding like Mom. “I loved today. I love our family,” I started.

“Me, too,” he said, waiting.

“It's just that . . . Mom doesn't have this. She never did, and it's all she has ever wanted. It just doesn't seem fair, you know?” I felt tears coming again, but my dad spoke up immediately.

“You know what I do, when it all gets to be too much?” He wasn't angry at all. He sounded like his teacher self, wise and calm, not the hurt man ready to flip out if someone burnt a pot of hot cocoa. “I take all of those feelings, all the sad and scary feelings, and I lock them in a box inside my head. You don't have to feel them at all, just put them away. You can deal with them later.”

Oh, how I tried to find that manly box in my head, to stuff it with all my crazy thoughts and feelings, but I just couldn't do it. All my emotions whipped and jumped through me like a pack of cracked-out monkeys. I was convinced that I
felt
more than anybody else. Not only my own, but I could also feel other people's feelings, too. Though I tried on the mantra “He who cares the least wins,” trying not to feel, for me, was crazy making.