Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (22 page)

I caught them midflight. My fingers trembling with self-consciousness, I opened the pack and lit up. “What’s going on with Dad?” I said, trying to sound older. “Why is he doing this?”

“I don’t know.” She glanced out the window above the sink and for a few seconds she was silent, almost contemplative. Mom pursed her lips and squinted before she confessed, “He told me he had to pull over before coming home some nights.” She paused. “Oh, Dick,” she said sadly, pressing her fingers to her lips. Then she admitted what was too horrible to keep to herself. “He said he cried every night before he could walk in the house.”

There was only one other time in my father’s adult life when anyone had knowledge of his tears. Rosa had told me about the day Dad introduced me to my siblings. She said he brought me home by himself because the doctor kept Mom in the hospital after I was born. Rosa didn’t explain why Mom wasn’t released, but I wondered if Mom had had a nervous breakdown. Rosa said that when Dad handed me over to my siblings, they tore off the receiving blanket and cried, “Take it back.” She said that Dad had broken down in tears.

Shocking as the news about Dad’s recent sorrows seemed, it rang true. Dad might have pulled over to cry for a few months, or years. “Why now?” I asked Mom.

“I guess I’ve hurt him,” she said, as if thinking back to something that happened years ago.

I tapped my cigarette even though there were no ashes and started to ask her to explain, but decided against it. Her tone sounded too intimate and her guard was down. She might tell me something I would regret hearing.

Every night for almost a week, I sat there with Mom, smoking and listening. At first she rambled. Anyone in her shoes would need to vent. The rambling turned to a drone, then a whir. I’d start to say something only to be run over by her rapid-fire talk, which mixed with laughter, then rage, then tears. She couldn’t sleep and took on a bedraggled appearance over the next week, while she plotted to win Dad back.

As she slipped into mania, I grew furious with my father. Yet I had to admit that if I were him I might just keep my foot on the pedal, too. I could see both sides, but being a teenager I needed to level my frustration against one party. Dad became my target.

I’d seen Mom survive two manic episodes. The third was only a question of time and stamina. How long before she would crash? Daily, older siblings called in for updates on the sly. Aunt Gert also checked in several times a day. She might have tried to talk Mom into signing in to the hospital, but Mom would have viewed that as betrayal.

Since Frank was commuting to Xavier University, I tried to help out by running errands for Mom. My car had an extra accelerator on its floorboard so I could accelerate with my left foot—not so different from any other car—but I was a nervous driver. Thus far I’d had almost no practice with an adult in the car because Mom had a habit of slamming an invisible brake on the passenger side while gripping her door and rearing back in her seat. I couldn’t pass the parallel-parking test until after Claire and Gretchen took me out to practice.

Days after Dad left, I drove to the shopping center to pick up school supplies for the babies. As I made a left turn into the shopping center, I misjudged the speed of an oncoming car and in a panic crashed into a car that was pulling out, just before being slammed by the car I misjudged. No one was injured, but three cars plus my self-confidence became casualties in what was turning out to be the summer of sorrows. And yet, like other tragedies I’d known, within an hour my car had been towed, a friend of the family had driven me home from the shopping center, and we were on to other things. Mom was unraveling fast.

At the end of a grueling week, my brother Michael said he’d sit with Mom so I could go out with a boy I’d recently met. In the year since my breakup with James, I’d gone out with a couple of boys, but no one as compelling as James. The first one had been one of James’s oldest friends. When he asked me out I said yes but only to hurt James, who then asked out one of my friends and suggested we double-date. Watching James make out with my friend made me think twice about doing this again. And yet there were more failed attempts at a similar mix with other friends. At times James and I went out alone, but those evenings culminated in arguments. This new boy was from a public school across town. Better still, he didn’t know anyone I knew and I didn’t know anyone he knew, which was a combination that could not have made me happier. People knew him by a nickname, but I think of him as Lance. He was blond and blue-eyed and might have been the most handsome boy I’d ever met. On top of that, he was the most humble boy I knew. In another girl’s life he would have made a perfect Lancelot—for a story, I imagine, with a happier ending.

I was nervous about leaving Mom, whose speech was so rapid it was incomprehensible. She was not sleeping or eating. As the oldest daughter at home, I felt territorial about Mom and knew that Michael, as our oldest brother, tended to take everything over. Now he was in law school, married, and a father. We still referred to him as “Special Boy.” Most of us viewed him as our second father; in fact, he commanded more authority than Dad. A few of us believed him to be nearly perfect, while others saw him as bossy. I leaned toward the latter, but had to admit that he had his own life in order. In a crisis, Michael seemed the best person to have around.

When I came downstairs to meet Lance in the den that evening, I found all three babies climbing my date’s six-and-a-half-foot frame to grip his head. “Egghead,” they called him. He laughed at this nickname and tossed the “babies” from his shoulders onto the couch.

At the party Lance glided seamlessly into my group of friends, who were happy to entertain him while I mingled. Under the bright lights of a tennis court, his hair shimmered above the crowd. I kept glancing back to where he and my friends chatted, nervous that he might not be having fun, but Lance was a bubbly, entertaining boy. “Does he never stop smiling?” I thought. “And it’s so genuine.”

Before I knew it, I came face to face with James. It had been several weeks since I’d last run into him. His stern face made my hands shake until I almost dropped my beer. Every time I saw him now, my throat dried up and my hands shook. The meaner he looked, the more I wanted him back.

“What’s up?” he asked.

With James, I had never outgrown my nervous chatter. I saw him and my darkest secrets flooded the space between us. “I totaled a car and my parents are getting a divorce,” I said in a quivering voice. “And Mom’s cracking up again.”

“What?” he said, waving off what he assumed was a joke. “
Your
parents splitting up?”

“I’m serious.”

“Come on,” he said, leading me through the crowd with that golfer’s stride, always a man surveying his prospects. This was my chance to say no to him, and yet my only concern was that no one saw us as we left the tennis court. He took my hand and we climbed a hill in the distance. From there I saw Lance glancing around for me. I should get back to him, I thought. Instead I laid out the details of my family’s crisis for James, who reached over and put his hand on my back right below my neck, the same place where my father used to rest his hand. The smell of cut grass reminded me of those Sunday afternoons with Dad on our screened-in porch, Joe Nuxhall on the radio. In my confused state, James was so like my father that I wanted to bury my head in his arms and sob, but his familiar reserve kept me planted at some distance.

“You want to go out tomorrow night?” he asked. I missed him so much. And yet in the middle of a crowd down there was a clear-eyed boy who laughed openly at my jokes, whose kindness and affection came without reservation. I said to James, “Pick me up after work. I have to get back now.” I scrambled to stand up while defeat sank in, and with a self-conscious wave goodbye I stepped into the mob.

After the party, Lance and I pulled up to my house. He kissed me goodnight in the driveway, my neck straining to meet his lips as he stooped over me. Suddenly my brother Kevin stepped out from between the dogwoods. He’d come to ask Lance to sit out here with me since there was “kind of an emergency” going on inside. Lance assured him that he would do that. Within minutes I sent Lance home so I could rush into the house.

In the kitchen I found Mom under the dim glow of the stove light, lost in a netherworld. There was no communicating with her. Her language was a garble of nonsense syllables. Seeing her like this, knowing that she had fought her way back from this place twice before, my heart ached for her.

“Eileen, you shouldn’t see this,” said Michael, so I looked to Kevin, who said, “There’s nothing you can do.”

“We have to help her,” I said, dropping to the floor to hug my mother. She didn’t seem to recognize me, and gathering her in my arms was harder than holding a frightened cat. Her eyes moved in a chaotic pattern as if synchronized to her scrambled words. “Why isn’t Dad here?” I said, bitterly.

“Go to bed,” snapped Michael.

“Come on,” said Kevin, leading me out to the stairs in the front hall. “Michael knows what he’s doing.”

I had to admit that Kevin was right.

In the darkened hallway I said, “You have to call Dad.” But Kevin said, “Dad needs a break this time. He might look better off than Mom, but he’s not. Aunt Gert will be here any second. She’ll call the hospital. Too many people around will only make it worse.”

I gave in.

Later, from my bed, I heard Mom being taken against her will by the paramedics. She had made it out of the locked ward twice before, but she’d never had to do that without Dad waiting for her at home. I doubted that she would make it out this time.

Over the next twenty-four hours I hardly left my room. Instead I wrote a poem about a battered crystal at the mercy of a raging ocean. James never called. It’s possible that he’d been grounded again. Or maybe he saw that his reappearance would only result in more heartbreak. I decided I would never trust another man.

Later, during a fitful sleep, it occurred to me that I would probably break my promise.

B
y Christmas, I had made an enemy of my father. He’d clenched his teeth through three months of parenting us while Mom was in the hospital. Over that time I botched dinners and complained about a sore under the back of my knee. Periodically Bridget called from Massachusetts and told me to make a list of chores and get everyone to pitch in. She didn’t pry into whatever was making Dad upset, but whatever it was, she wanted me to stop. The problem with this last piece of advice was that I didn’t know what I’d done to Dad, other than my acting the bratty teenager. In the past I’d been Dad’s “Trixie”; now I was a no-good lout. As far as I was concerned, Dad had turned into a mean and scary guy, but a man I desperately needed.

Then there was the problem of Frankie and me being in charge. No one had ever seen us as having any authority. We certainly didn’t see ourselves that way. The babies balked when we told them to go to bed. Ted laughed in our faces.

Adding to my growing sense of ineptitude was the fact that the sore behind my knee throbbed every time I stood up. Aunt Gert took a look at it and told me there was a boil where my weight rested on the leg and it should be treated by a doctor. Dad said I was only trying to get out of school. Based on my grades and the time I’d broken the clasp, his conclusion was logical, but in fact I had never stayed home from school due to pain. I took offense at first. Then, in my irrational mind, I got him back by
not
seeing a doctor. Besides, if I walked long enough, the boil went numb.

Within a few weeks, Mom was released from the hospital and Dad was back in his apartment. Because my sympathy was with Mom, I calmed down. To everyone’s astonishment, life at home ran smoothly with Mom back at the helm.

For me, school became a welcome retreat. Even my grades rose. I had joined the glee club and our Christmas concert was coming up. From the telephone next to Liz’s bed, I called Dad to invite him to come. I was as nervous calling my father as I had been when I called James that first time to ask him to my dance. This is my father, I thought, it’s crazy to be so nervous. Then Dad surprised me again. “No,” he said. “I can’t come to that.” There was a lengthy silence while I took this in. Too shocked to speak, I waited for an explanation. None came.

“But I have a special part this year. Only a few girls made it into the vocal ensemble.” Already I was sobbing while my father waited on the other end in unyielding silence. “Pleeease, Dad!”

“Honey, I just can’t do that.” He didn’t say so, but he couldn’t show up to an event where so many of his friends would want to know why he’d left us. People would shun him. Still I wanted him to do this for me, and I interpreted this slight on top of our ongoing struggle as an indication that he wanted to punish me. My tears erupted into an adolescent scourge. “You’ve never come to anything of mine. No one ever comes to anything of mine. You hate me!”

“Honey, I don’t hate you.”

“You hate me. Oh, yes, you do. Everyone in the family hates me.” My nose running, chest and shoulders heaving, I screamed into the telephone, “And I hate myself!” Then I hung up. I stayed there for the longest time, trying to calm down, waiting for the phone to ring. He never called back.

W
ithout warning, and a few months into his first year of college, James called and invited me to go with him to a Christmas party at the home of a mutual friend. The familiarity of that ritual would tie me to a happier past, I told myself. On the other hand, given my fragile state, a date with James was not advisable. I quickly agreed to go.

This time I prepared myself for the aftermath by doing the one thing I knew best: I would sit down and write him a letter, in which I would admit defeat. I’d say that I knew our relationship, whatever it had become, was hopeless. I’d confess that I loved him,
as if
there had ever been any doubt. I told myself I had no delusions about his reaction to this news: if I could go through with this, he would definitely flee.

Convinced of my own maturity and resolve, I failed to see the uncanny resemblance between my sophisticated plan and the lyrics of two songs by the pop diva Olivia Newton-John.