CHAPTER SIX

Migraine

My mother sat at the breakfast table, her head in her hands, her face as white as if she had covered it with talcum powder.

“Owwwh, there’s a knife in my head going through my left eye,” she groaned.

From my spot across from her at the table, I could not help but imagine that knife’s polished metal blade slicing through my mother’s head.

“Your mother’s got another migraine,” my father announced from his spot at the table’s head. He was half-dressed in a V-neck T-shirt and Jockey shorts. Unshaven, barefoot, his hair sticking up in clumps, he scanned the movie section of the LA Times, crinkling the pages as he turned them.

I associated my mother’s efficacy in the world with her glasses. They allowed her to see clearly, to plot a reasonable course for our family. She never took them off unless she was sleeping or when fighting with my father had brought her to weeping. Now my mother’s glasses dangled from one earpiece in her left hand, as if she were unwilling to relinquish them. With the other hand, she shielded her eyes from the light. The glasses had left their deep impression on her pale, fragile, skin, and without them, she looked strangely naked. When she finally opened her eyes, they appeared clear and deep green like some forest animal not used to looking at humans. When my mother had a migraine it hurt to look through her glasses, it hurt if even a little glare of light caught her lens. When my mother had a migraine, it hurt to even have eyes.

Impervious, my father sat drinking his coffee in big, boisterous slurps, slamming his cup up and down wildly against the saucer, sloshing coffee onto the table. My mother winced as each slam of my father’s cup reverberated through her body.

She groaned again. “Will someone please shoot me,” she said. At the word “shoot,” I winced, feeling a sharp jolt in my own chest.

Eva had inherited migraines from her mother. She could get one from the glare of headlights, from Paul’s inadvertently shining a flashlight in her eyes, from movies, merry-go-rounds, roller coasters, even my twirling before her. Once she had seen the aura of flashing light, the headache became inevitable.

The night before, Ira had taken her to The Luau, a nightclub in Hollywood where they’d eaten Polynesian food and watched a stage show.

“I knew I shouldn’t have eaten those sweet, sticky sauces,” my mother said. “They never agree with me.”

“Maybe you’re allergic to too good a time,” my father said. “Or to watching me have too good a time.”

“Anything for a good time,” she said.

Paul had protested against my mother’s leaving the house. He’d held hostage the cans of chow mein and noodles she’d planned to cook for our dinner. If she could not cook us dinner, she would not leave us, he figured. Paul and I sat on his bed conspiring, the stolen goods under his pillow. My mother stood in the doorway of the boys’ room, at the threshold of the printed linoleum floor’s pandemonium display of cowboys and Indians, the late afternoon sun on her face.

“Paul, cut this out. Don’t make me plead with you. Why can’t you just let me go out with Daddy without making a scene?”

“Why would you want to go out with him?” Paul said.

“Stop it. He’s your father, Paul. Why would you want to make me choose between my son and my husband?”

“He’s the one who makes you choose. He doesn’t like you to give me any attention. He’s so jealous. Ever since I was a little boy, he didn’t like it when I touched you.”

“Paul, you’re twelve now; it’s time to grow up. Why do you bait him? And if your father acts like a baby, do you have to?”

“When you leave us with Ben, he screams at us and makes us watch World War II movies and roller derby. They give me nightmares,” Paul said.

“And he spanks us whenever he feels like it,” I added. “Unless we lock him out of the house and then we’re afraid to let him back in.”

“Give me the food back, Paul,” my mother said, “and if you don’t want him to spank you, behave—and don’t lock him out of the house.” She held out her hand.

Paul relinquished the Chun King. My mother got dressed up, sprayed her hair, turned her head so we could kiss her gingerly on the cheek, and left.

Now at the breakfast table, Eva fought to hold on to the last vestiges of her morning routine, trying to get her coffee down, sip by tiny sip. She swirled the contents of her cup with suspicion, as if she expected something nasty to surface to the top. Then she realized that even that slight movement increased her vertigo.

“Oh, God, I’m so nauseous,” she said, belching.

My father peered over the top of his newspaper and said way too loudly, “Jesus, Evvie, you look white as a sheet.”

My heart started to pound with anxiety; what if the migraine killed my mother this time?

Paul arrived at the table, looking rumpled.

“What’s wrong with Mom?” he asked.

“She’s got a terrible migraine,” I answered.

“Again?” he asked. He glared at my father. “What did you make her eat last night?”

“Paul—” my mother said, “don’t start.”

“When you go out with him, you always get sick.”

“Your mother and I had a wonderful time last night,” my father said.

Paul filled his bowl to the brim with Cheerios and began to eat them with his hands, and then as if he’d suddenly remembered that milk existed, reached across the table for it, and poured it on until it was about to overflow his bowl. He spooned a damp hill of sugar in the center.

My mother got up from the table slowly, holding her head to keep it from jostling and went into the kitchen to get an ice bag. Holding it over her eye, she moved slowly into the bedroom where she lay down on the bed, and Paul and I followed. Paul curled up perpendicular to my mother and clung to her legs. I lay on my father’s side of the bed near her feet. We tried to be perfectly quiet. “Poor, poor Mommy,” Paul said, pretending to be a cat, kneading her legs and purring. My mother kicked him off her.

“Paul, you’re way too old to play cat,” she said. “Take Debbie and go into the other room.”

We sat up on the bed so we weren’t touching my mother’s body but didn’t leave the room. All my mother wanted when she had a migraine was for everyone to keep still, for everything to stop. Absolute silence, darkness, peace. No one to ask anything from her. Not a fly buzzing, not a breeze blowing. Even her own blood coursing through her head hurt. But unless Ira was sleeping, he was incapable of being still or quiet or peaceful. Unless he took a pill.

My father came into the bedroom and I scrunched in as he threw his full weight on the bed. We all quaked from the impact. He lay still for a few minutes, but whatever he was thinking about must have made him anxious because he started twirling his hair and whispering to himself, engaging in a remembered conversation. His weight shifted from side to side, and he twitched the big toe of his right foot against the toe next to it. Twitch, twitch, twitch, as steady and unconscious as an alarm clock’s ticking. Pretty soon he was jiggling the bed, up and down, up and down.

“Ira, stop it!” my mother said, raising her voice, and then gripping her head because the sound only made the pain worse. “Do you even know what you’re doing? Can’t you for once take care of me, or do I always have to be the one to take care of you? I feel like I have four children instead of three.”

“As if you’d know what to do if I acted like a real man.”

“Your idea of being a real man is to yell at your sons and carry on.”

My father got up.

“Take them out of here with you,” she said. I got up to go with my father, but Paul lingered, happy to have my mother all to himself, even if only for a moment, even while she was in an impaired state.

“C’mon, Momma’s Boy,” my father said.

Paul looked at my mother, imploring her to keep him close.

“Go help your father,” she said.

“I’ll make the three of us lunch,” Ira said.

“We just had breakfast,” Paul said.

“I’m hungry,” my father said.

“You’re always hungry,” Paul said.

“We only had cereal,” I said.

In the kitchen my father stared into the refrigerator for a few minutes, then concluded that everything in it would require planning and cooking, and my father neither planned nor cooked. He opened the pantry doors and perused the canned goods while Paul and I hovered on either side of his rotund belly.

“Paul and I want spaghetti,” I said. “Franco-American.”

“Anything else?” My father would never say that certain foods did not go with others, or that two cans were enough when three might be better.

“Hey, we can have our own Las Vegas buffet,” he said. He took out cans of Hormel tamales and Queen Isabella sardines.

“We’ll have a little orgy of flavors,” he said.

He rolled up his shirt sleeves, turned the kitchen faucet on full force, and immersed his hands and arms in a current of steaming hot water. Then he poured detergent on them and rubbed them together till suds emerged and cast-off soap bubbles floated in the air. Pretending to be a surgeon, he held his hands up in the air, cleared his throat theatrically, and declaimed, “Paul, fresh towel, puh-leeze.” We all laughed.

“Yes, doctor,” Paul answered, falling into his part. He handed him a dishtowel, touching only its edges, understanding that “fresh” meant unsullied by human hands. My father wiped his hands, then let the towel drop to his feet.

“All right, ready for surgery,” he said. He took the cans to the sink and blasted them with hot water, spraying the curtains and walls in the process.

“Stop,” Paul said, “you’re getting everything soaking wet.” Ira lined the cans up on the counter for inspection, turning each from side to side, checking the seams for bulges. Even a tiny dent in a seam signaled danger. Signs of rust rendered a can unusable. He hesitated over the can of tamales and then thrust it before Paul’s eyes.

“Paul, is it my imagination or is that seam bulging ever so slightly?”

“Hmmm,” Paul said, examining it methodically. “It’s just the way the light is reflecting against it,” he said. “I could go get my magnifying glass if you want.”

“Nah,” my father concluded.

It was time for the most critical test: my father placed his almost-thumb on the top of the can of tamales and pushed down against it. If the top went up and down, the can was no longer airtight and poisonous gases had invaded it. In my father’s universe, botulism was not a rarity; every can was likely to harbor it. We must be ever vigilant against this tasteless, odorless, ubiquitous assassin.

If I were to eat food from a defective can, if I even tasted it, I knew I would die. But I wondered what would happen if I only smelled it or touched it or breathed the air too close to it. When I walked by the shelf of cans, I held my breath. What if the botulism germs could travel from inside the can to inside my body?

My father pushed the lid down again, and it seemed to give just a little. He put the can aside.

“Paul, what do you think?” This was another side of my father’s relationship with Paul; when he wasn’t yelling at him or blaming him, he was calling on his intelligence and technical expertise.

Paul looked uncertain.

“Well, if in doubt, let’s get another,” my father said, returning to the cupboard and throwing the unopened can into the trash. It hit with a loud thud.

“Whoops,” Paul said.

We all laughed again.

Paul took the replacement can from Ira’s hands. He held it very close to his eyes and twisted it slowly, once, twice, three revolutions.

“This one is patent,” he said.

“Very good,” my father answered, taking the can and examining it for himself. “You are a superb surgical assistant.” And my father smiled and cocked his head, lost in self-scrutiny. In the midst of the can-opening compulsion, he realized its absurdity. “You know, Freud would consider this highly neurotic behavior,” Ira said.

But even if Ira did not wholly believe that botulism contaminated our food, he felt helpless against his need to perform the ritual that conferred a magical form of insurance. By pronouncing botulism’s name, we would not be taken unawares. My father possessed no physical prowess, not even the ability to make a fist. As the man of the family, he could only perform these sacred rituals to guard us.

Of course, I had not yet probed the emotional nuances of my father’s declarations. I was a literalist, a true believer. When my father said there could be botulism in the food, I did not doubt him. Even as I was laughing along, I was also terrified.

My father took a can opener and held it poised over the can.

“Shhh!” he said.

All three of us crowded in, lowered our heads to the can, then held our breath, waiting for the “pffft.” This sound of air rushing into a can was the sign that would release us, at least temporarily, from the impending disaster that hung over our family’s heads. When the can “pfffted” (the word was both a noun and a verb), we took a breath and sighed in unison. But even though I’d heard it with my own ears, I did not trust myself.

“Daddy, did you hear the can pffft?” I asked him. “Are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? Tell me you heard it. Tell me!”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Paul, tell her you heard it too.”

Paul, who read science magazines and studied biology, had begun to question the ritual’s logic.

“Actually,” Paul said, “botulism is an anaerobe that doesn’t need air to live. If the can pfffts, that only proves there was no air inside it . . .”

“Nooo!” I whimpered and whined. “Daddy, Paul says we can still die of botulism.”

“Paul, why are you starting with me when we’re about to have a nice lunch? Are you trying to upset her? Reassure your sister.”

“Well, at least we won’t get ptomaine, that’s aerobic, and much more common,” Paul said.

Once my father had heard the can “pffft,” he felt free to eat its contents with gluttonous abandon. Once I began to think about botulism in the food, I could not stop thinking about it. In the hours afterward, I would imagine the botulism bacteria like trans lucent spiders making their way up through my bloodstream. Then I would feel dizzy and sick, convinced that the botulism had found a way to evade even my father’s vigilance and make its canny way to my brain.

“I’m afraid I’m dying of botulism,” I would say.

“You don’t have anything but way too vivid an imagination,” my mother would respond.

My father would look at me quizzically, disavowing my behavior, as if it had nothing to do with anything he might have said or done.

The tamales went into one pot, the spaghetti into another. While my father waited for them to heat, he made a sandwich by folding a slice of white bread over a sardine and then spritzing it with lemon juice. He ate it without a plate as he stood at the stove, stirring first one pot and then the other, fish oil and lemon juice dripping on the floor. He threw away the part of the bread that his hand had touched; even hot water and soap could not make his defective hands clean enough to eat from.

Growing impatient, my father turned up the heat. The tamales and spaghetti boiled over and spewed onto the stove.

By the time lunch was over, every plate and glass sat dirty and abandoned at random locations throughout the kitchen. Tamale sauce had burned black onto the stove. The uncapped bottle of ginger ale, needed to relieve my mother’s nausea, stood precariously close to the edge of the counter next to a tray of melting ice cubes. My father never thought to refill the ice trays or put them back into the freezer. He could not seem to conceptualize a future when he might want ice again. He could think only as far as the next thing that might quell the booming desire within him.

“Mom needs more ice,” Paul announced, coming into the kitchen from the bedroom, where he had disappeared. “Do we have any ice left?”

My father poured the remaining slivers of ice into my mother’s ice bag. Paul took it, held it up to his own cheek, and tilted his head to one side, looking wistful. He was imagining the bag next to her cheek, its proximity to her, its proximity to him, the next best thing to touching her. He raced off to the bedroom, from where we could hear him shout.

“Oh, no, Mom’s getting sick. She’s going to throw up.” I whimpered and put my hands over my ears, running to the threshold of the hallway, then screaming to block out the sound. I was almost as afraid of other people throwing up as I was of throwing up myself. My father hurried into the bedroom, and I watched him hold my mother up and move her quickly into the bathroom. Even with my hands over my ears, I could hear her retch, the retching distinctively in her voice, distinguishable from everyone else’s in my family. It sounded as if something foreign had overtaken her—as if the knife had cut its way from her head down into her body, and then back up through her throat. As if everything bad she had swallowed up till then was wrenching its way to a violent escape.

My father opened the refrigerator to get my mother’s injection. When my mother’s migraines were severe, she gave herself a shot of a painkiller. After a few minutes, I heard the toilet flush and then everything went quiet. My father emerged from the bedroom with his sport coat and shoes on.

“I’m going into town,” he said, grabbing the movie section of the newspaper on his way out the door. “There’s a sneak preview at Grauman’s Chinese. I have a feeling it’s that new Marilyn Monroe picture. Let your mother sleep now.”

The house was finally still. Paul and I tiptoed into my mother’s bedroom and watched her sleep. We lay on the bed, not touching her, not touching each other, listening to her breathe, slowly, evenly, deeply. Breathing with her.

After a while, Paul and I went in the living room. Paul tried to find something for us to watch on TV and I looked at my circus picture book. I had already decided which animal fit each of my family members. Ben was the tiger who paced around the ring and growled; Paul was one of the clown’s trained dogs. My father was a brown bear who stood on a ball on his hind legs and danced. The crowd laughed at his antics. Every once in a while, without apparent provocation, he’d rear up, threatening to attack.

And my mother? Eva was a beautiful white horse that pranced around the ring. On the horse, a graceful girl in a glittering ballerina’s tutu rode bareback, as if she and the horse were one. I longed to be that girl, but I knew that I was more like the chimpanzee who clambered by the horse’s side.

The next morning, Eva pulled out the built-in wooden cutting board to make coffee. I peered at the board but couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. It had turned black overnight.

“Mommy, what happened . . .” I started to ask.

My mother propped up her glasses nearer to her eyes and moved her head in closer, and then, when she saw swirls of movement within the blackness, signs of independent agency, she recoiled, jerked her head back, and screamed. My mother’s scream was not a high-pitched, uninhibited horror movie scream, but an amplified yech of disgust that she aborted as quickly as it threatened to become full-blooded. It was enough to bring Paul running, toothpaste still caked at the sides of his mouth.

“Look,” she said, pointing.

Before us teemed a sea of black ants. The motion of opening the board had thrown the ants into a frenzy, and they darted to and fro, zigzagging over and on top of one another, some already half-crushed, or their legs impeded by some sticky remnant of ginger ale or slick of sardine oil. My mother shuddered in revulsion. My father’s carelessness had invited in the chaos.

I watched as one industrious insect carried a crumb as big as itself in its mouth. My mother put on gloves and scrubbed the board ferociously with bleach. The ants sputtered and bobbed, and their legs broke off. As small as they were, as different from us, something in them fought for life. I didn’t like watching their struggle or the furor with which my mother attacked them. She washed the flood of ant corpses into the bucket of bleach, where they floated on top, black lint.

Then she brought out the poison and relentlessly sought out every crack in the tile, every seam along the floorboards. My mother took no prisoners, showed no mercy. By the time my father arrived for his morning coffee, the kitchen was pristine.

Present, Dining Room, My House, Sunday, 6:00 p.m.

My family has come over for dinner, meaning my two brothers, Ben and Paul, Ben’s wife, and their adult daughter, my niece. We’ve gathered to commemorate Mother’s Day and I’ve cooked some of the dishes we associate with Eva: meatballs in red sauce, chicken roasted till it falls apart, in a sauce of onions, garlic, celery, and carrots.

I’ve modified my mother’s recipes a bit, replaced the Crisco with olive oil, used gluten-free Panko instead of her soggy Wonder bread. As I cook, though, I can still see Eva’s hands, large and powerful, breaking the eggs, smooshing the bread into the raw meat. I feel close to my mother then, which is not to say, as Paul might, that her spirit is actually present—only that cooking was one activity she taught me how to do, and in cooking she demonstrated nurturance and competence in harmony.

We’ve been at the table for five minutes, and Ben has already assumed his familiar pose, crouched over his plate defensively, elbows at the ready, a mad dog protecting his food from the pack of other mad dogs on his scent. We ate quickly and warily in my family since Ira’s mealtime behavior was unpredictable. He could either be convivial, happily stuffing himself and telling jokes, burping theatrically afterward, or seething, ready to poise an attack.

Dinner with my brothers has now become an occasion where our shared hypochondria rules. In deference to Gary, everyone tries to restrain themselves from discussing bowel and bladder function—basically anything below the waist—but that does not prevent animated conversations about eye floaters and tinnitus, stomach pain and various degrees of inability to digest, betrayed by the massive quantities of food being simultaneously ingested. Then there is the trump card: Ben’s chronic heart arrhythmia.

At one end of the table, Paul sorrowfully minces his food into tiny pieces. He used to say he couldn’t eat anything other than baby food because of post-surgical adhesions; now he minces due to dental woes. Gary, at the other end of the table, attempts to ignore all this, to just eat his dinner in peace. He’ll try to engage my family in some other topic, but they only have energy for what’s wrong with them.

My brothers and I all proclaim our suffering, as if a prize will be awarded tonight to the one who’s suffered the most, the one who can describe their affliction in the most vivid terms. What would it take to get a good mother to arrive and take care of us? We have whimpered and whined, begged and complained, demonstrated and performed—theatrically, convincingly, heartrendingly—and she is still gone.

There are real conditions from which we suffer, medically documented, certifiably diagnosed diseases, and none of us has yet treated them as my father did his chronic distress, with barbiturates or opioids, so perhaps that constitutes a small triumph. Our relationship to them is not simple, though.

“Why does everyone in your family smile when talking about their worst complaints?” Gary asks. “They seem to take some kind of perverse pleasure in their own suffering. I’ve never seen anyone else say, ‘I think I have a brain tumor,’ and smile about it.”

“It’s because we kind of know we’re being ridiculous,” I say. But that doesn’t fully answer his question.

My husband hates this aspect of the culture into which he mar ried. His family was opposite, thriving on repression. It took me several days of visiting his parents after his mother’s hysterectomy, and asking diplomatically about the reason for it, before I finally heard the C-word uttered. In my husband’s family culture, you could minimize the power of unpleasantness by refusing to speak its name. They looked away. They talked about other things. My family discusses their physical complaints in the contrary belief that if you do not keep an eye on them, they will overtake you. It’s worse than that; we feel a compulsion to catalog them for one another, to track their ongoing acts of sabotage, and hope that the listener might contain them for us. Or love us more for our woundedness.

Displays of emotion caused my mother to withdraw, but her ears pricked up at a solid symptom. She knew how to treat the body: with Vicks VapoRub vigorously applied to the chest, followed by a patch of blanket pinned onto an undershirt; with spoonfuls of milk of magnesia, and bright pink liquid antibiotics; with Epsom salt soaks; and with Campbell’s cream of vegetable soup served on a bedside tray.

My father could always outshine us in the bizarreness and operatic intensity of his physical complaints; after all, he’d had years before we were born to figure out the best way to garner a response from Eva. So to gain my mother’s attention, we had to sound even louder alarms, and we did, our childhoods marked by severe allergy and asthma attacks, by mononucleosis, mysterious rashes, hernia procedures, emergency appendectomies, and, despite my father’s relentless attempts to protect us from food poisoning, rare strains of salmonella.

“Everything I eat gives me pain,” Ben says. “Right here.” He points to a spot low on his bulging abdomen. Uh-oh, he’s getting perilously close to below the waist.

“Looks like your transverse colon,” Paul diagnoses.

We all have anatomy charts inscribed in our brains. Uh-oh, Gary has thrown me a look that says, You better stop them before they get to the end of that colon.

“Diverticulitis again,” Ben says. “There are no seeds in the meatballs, are there?”

“What seeds would I put in there?” I say. “You know I’m deathly allergic to sesame. And these meatballs are gluten-free.”

“Maybe I should give up gluten, too,” Ben says. “But that hasn’t cured your fibromyalgia, right?”

I shake my head and feel the pain radiate over my body. Have years of anxiety contributed to the burnout of my nervous system that some theorize causes fibromyalgia, or are anxiety and fibro simply two related conditions? And when everyone thought my father was just crazy, complaining of pain everywhere and a myriad of other symptoms, could he have had fibromyalgia as well?

“Do you have any olive oil?” Paul says. “If I put it on the food, it goes down more easily. Organic—preferably.”

I give him the bottle and he scans its label approvingly, then drizzles it liberally over everything on his plate. It’s a show I can’t refrain from watching.

Gary pours himself his third glass of wine. “You’re all doing it again,” he says. “Can’t you talk about anything else?”

“What are we doing?” Paul asks. It’s that faux innocent provocateur’s tone that he developed in his cat-and-mouse games with my father.

“You’re a bunch of hypochondriacs. All you talk about is your awful symptoms,” Gary says. “Can any of you even hear yourselves? It’s a sickness.”

Gary can’t understand that talking about the horrors of disease is a form of intimacy my brothers and I share. Although no mother will arrive to take care of us, delineating everything that’s wrong with us serves as a kind of balm. It’s one of the few things that makes us feel better.