Habit (6 page)

There are some riveting memoirs out these days by people whose early years were incredibly intense. You keep checking the author's picture on the back cover for facial disfigurement and missing ears, or just to confirm the miracle that they survived. I enjoy these stories as much as the next person, but they kind of make it tough to justify my own need for therapy. My childhood, while it left a lot of scars, had subtler traumas that never really seemed to explain my personal level of angst. I keep thinking I must be a little boring:

—Um, it was really really loud when they slammed the doors, and one time she threatened to leave, even. That really scared me.

—Of course, because she couldn't bear to see you all suffer. So she tried to drown you in the bathtub—

—No. She just put on her coat for a minute. But Colette had to drown—

—Okay, but she knocked you all unconscious that night and poured gasoline all over you and then—

—No.

—No? Are you sure you just don't remember? Do you have blackouts, multiple personalities?

—No, no blackouts. But—okay, the gardener groped me.

—How terrible! He violated you!

—No. He, you know, felt me up and sort of kissed me.

—You mean he repeatedly raped you over a period of years and told you not to tell anyone or he would kill your parents?

—Well, no. It was just the one time. But he didn't have any teeth . . .

For me, it took a Meisner acting teacher to convince me to try therapy. She pointed out I was dodging conflict unnaturally in scenes and improvisations. My partner could be flipping out all over the place, yelling horrible things at me or whatever and instead of yelling right back, or at least admitting how I felt about what he was doing, I'd try to calm him down, or worse, I'd just giggle inanely. It's good not to get in an argument at the drop of a hat in real life, but my teacher wanted me to be able to go for it in the imaginary world, and I was clearly blocked. So I sucked it up and let myself unload on a series of therapists. I even took Ma's advice and tried Adult Children of Alcoholics.

It was exhilarating when the results started showing and I “came to life” in acting class. I could cry real tears and holler bloody murder all day long—in fact, I did, because expressing my true feelings felt so cathartic and pure, I couldn't bring myself to leave such liberating behavior behind in the classroom. If a bunch of construction workers tried to embarrass me with loud appreciative comments as I passed on the way home from class in Times Square, instead of ducking my head as usual and increasing my pace, I'd stop in the middle of an intersection and give them what for at the top of my lungs, complete with enough graphic hand gestures to make them all blush. I collared my landlord in a stairwell about our yearlong unresolved water temperature problem and informed him with gusto that he was a
flaming asshole
. My mother couldn't get away with
anything
anymore. I think David sort of regrets introducing me to the Meisner Technique.

What I had come to understand in therapy was that there were too many things we didn't talk about in our family. In the 1960s, people didn't realize that when a little girl tells her sister that the disgusting gardener defiled her one afternoon in the kitchen, it's not enough for her parents to fire the monster and pretend nothing happened. The little girl shouldn't have to wait till she's twenty-three years old to begin to face how utterly terrifying and life-changing that experience was.

Instead I was left to draw my own conclusions from the gardener episode and its aftermath. It's been a lifelong process. In Ireland, at the impressionable age of seven, I contemplated the elements that made up my small, dangerous world: the recent shocking introduction to horrors lurking in the kitchen, my basic lack of popularity with my older siblings (who had their own traumas to work through and weren't particularly thrilled by my
Special
status), my father's general emotional unavailability, and the strong possibility that my only ally was becoming more mentally unhinged by the day and might just leave if she didn't get what she needed. I figured I had to come up with my own strategy for coping.

It was pretty logical. If the world wasn't safe and Ma was the one person in the family who took a real interest in my welfare, and she was about to fall apart, then my personal survival depended completely on keeping her together so she'd stick around. Even though the role of the
Special
one was beginning to stink, I had to milk it for all it was worth. I had to take care of my scary, fragile mother any way I could think of. This solution would do nothing for my reputation with my siblings, but I saw no other choice at age seven. I became my mother's caretaker, because without her, I'd REALLY be left in the clutches of the next foul-smelling groundskeeper who blundered into our home in search of a place to stick his nasty old tongue.

Wicklow, 1966

So I became a habitual watchdog. When Ma ran to her room to cry, it was my job to follow her there and try to comfort her. And from that moment onward, I wasn't just reluctant to go out for a sleepover because I'd be homesick: I was afraid to leave her for too long in case she needed me to settle her down when she began to freak. This is partly why I switched schools so often—for a solid two-year period I pretended I was sick, so I could stay home all day and keep an eye on her.

Even Daddy came to regret the move to Ireland. He'd dreamed about Philadelphia every single night we were there. So it was not too hard for him when he finally faced facts and took Ma back to civilization.

By then, she was in the throes of a thyroid condition, complicated by undiagnosed perimenopause. It was too late. The marriage was still a disaster and no amount of country clubs, modern dishwashers, and wall-to-wall carpeting was going to help stop the battles that started when Daddy came home from the mishmash of jobs he'd cobbled together trying to make his life interesting. Still no lawyering and not enough money for Ma, which meant continued conflict.

We girls did our best to not be around for the fights, but we sure heard them down the hall at homework time. Nothing was ever said about their nightly hollering and stomping at dinner, when we all shifted seamlessly into Perfect Table mode. We had to set the table exactly right with
this kind of napkin placed exactly like this with the fork just like that beside, not on top of the napkin, and aligned on a diagonal with the glass—no, not that kind of glass, the one in the pantry on the third shelf and now we need the candles lit—no not just the little ones, the tall ones. Susie go get the tall candlesticks in the sideboard and then refold this napkin, its border needs to be showing in the upper left hand corner.
“Please pass the salt” wasn't quite right. It had to be
please pass the salt, Colette.
The topic of conversation had to be soothing, stimulating, and above all something Ma liked to talk about.

The Night of the Fork, everything was arranged just so and Daddy lurched in as usual to take his seat at the head of the table, wait for the blessing, and dig in.

Our father was as complex as Ma in his own way. It was really too bad he had such a problem with drinking, because when Daddy was in good form, he was absolutely delightful. He had a wonderful beaming smile and that special kind of manner that makes everyone feel appreciated. Going into the city with Daddy was a thrill because of all the different kinds of people who knew him and seemed so glad to see him—train conductors, waitresses, businessmen on the street. They all called him Mike, and he'd stop to talk to each of them. He was fantastic at names, so he'd make it seem as if it was his own particular pleasure to introduce us to everyone.

We loved Daddy a lot, but one of the things we'd all like to have changed was his appalling table manners. He was a huge, grunting, freckled redheaded ogre at the table, with chicken grease and melted artichoke butter all over himself.

So we were meant to keep eating despite the stomach-turning spectacle at Daddy's end, and help make
pleasant conversation
with Ma at her end, which was basically only anything Ma was interested in. We were, for the most part, unstimulated by Ma's topics, so the goal was always to try to engage Daddy, partly because he was more fun to talk to, but also just to get him to stop looking and sounding like a Neanderthal for a second.

That night was one of the good ones when one of us got his attention but, predictably, the subject matter did not pass muster with Ma. Daddy, perhaps too well lubricated to even register the degree of Ma's annoyance, wouldn't adapt to any change she tried. So she got up from the table and stalked out in the direction of the kitchen, where we heard her banging and crashing pots and pans around in a pointed, threatening sort of way.

When Ma's hysteria reached a certain feverish pitch, she often took it to the kitchen and expressed it by cleaning very very loudly. To this day, if David makes a certain kind of noise in our kitchen, my pulse quickens and I feel a reflexive urge to scurry to a safe corner of the cellar.

An ordinary family might have dispatched someone to soothe Ma, but by 1969 we had all given up the pretense of ordinariness. Even I, back in school full-time and successful with sleepovers by then, was beginning to think about easing my grip on the caretaker role and see what things were like on the other team. So I stayed at the table, and we all simply continued the offending conversation, which was probably about politics. Eventually we heard the kitchen door slam shut, and there was an ominous silence, different and confusing. Was she leaving us, and if so, was that a good thing or a bad thing?

Then
ZAP,
like in
Jaws
when the shark's bristling snappers fill the screen with a jolt: Ma appeared, teeth bared in a close-up just outside the darkened dining room window, rapping a loud staccato rhythm with a fork on the thin glass. It was more than
Jaws,
it was the Alien busting out of John Hurt's chest. It was Norman Bates, sweeping aside the shower curtain to the pulsing sound of screeching violins.

It was the
Here's Johnny!!!
moment in
The Shining
when the boy and his mother realize that the head of the household is not feeling quite as friendly as he was back when they decided to move into an obviously haunted hotel and get completely cut off with him in a blinding snowstorm for the entire winter with no help in sight, and the camera is close on Nicholson's wild-eyed face with his crazed, razzle-dazzle grin.

Here's Ma!!!
Scwreech scwreech scwreeeeeeeeeech!

We all have mild PTSD flashbacks of the Night of the Fork. Even though we'd gotten out of Ireland in one piece and there was an ocean between me and that gardener, Ma was right outside the window and there was no telling what she might do next.

—So she smashed through that glass with the fork, didn't she, and she leaped at your father like the Alien, and she gouged his eyes out right there in front of you, and strings of viscous eyeball gelatin splatted all over the melted artichoke butter while you screamed and screamed—

—Well, no, not exactly. But dinner was pretty much ruined. . . .

This afternoon at the Huntingdon Cancer Center, she has no fork, but Ma's eyes are crossed, the grin is in place, and I think I see purple smoke coming out the top of her head.

It's been quite a while, though, since the Night of the Fork. The new improved Susie who had all that therapy just smiles at the doctor and the nurses, and looks at her and says “My, you seem very cranky!”

—Oh, not at ALLLL!!!! I'm so HAPPPYYYY!!!!! I'm DONE and I can get CHANGED!!!!! cackles Ma.

Several doors open in the hall, and people poke their heads out to see what the ruckus is.

I bat my eyes at Doctor Morris and tell them all we are very much looking forward to the beginning of radiation next week.

Sometimes I exaggerate. That gardener had at least two teeth.

Wicklow, 1965