LINDA JOY MYERS
Back then, when my body was small and pale, everything had sharp sounds, and the colors would scratch or caress my skin, and flashes of knowledge would go off behind my eyes. I lived with my grandmother in the middle of the empty howling plains, sandwiched between amber-colored wheat and the great azure sky; or in other weather, between grey, wind-blown weeds and thunderheads that reached to the heavens, purple, green, or indigo blue. When it was grey and purple outside, the wind whipped up and pressed you into the earth, pushed you and pulled you until you couldn’t stand up, you couldn’t catch your breath. Then, you knew that everything was bigger than you, and you couldn’t do a thing about it.
Inside the small house on Park Street in a town in Oklahoma, storms brewed. Gram, who’d rescued me from the mean lady who hit me for no reason, where my parents had sent me for reasons no one could ever figure out, was the “good fairy” for the first couple of years, plying me with smiles and Cream of Wheat with brown sugar, offering piano lessons, which opened up a world. The piano would lay itself before me, a puzzle of black and white keys, its language locked behind hieroglyphs of black and white notes on a staff, mysterious to decode.
The sprinklers were hissing on the lawns on a hot July night, the other kids playing catch, their laughter lifting into the air, when the mysteries of the musical staff opened themselves to me: E, E flat, F, F sharp, A, A flat. Middle C. Stunned to read this new language, I played the notes and watched as each bloomed into its own color before me. The wine red of B flat, the dark purple of E flat. D flat was dangerous and jagged. The sharps were bright—F sharp was a warm orange, D sharp a warm beige. C was white, neutral.
As time went on, my fingers grasped at chords and melodies, and layers of color emerged into the smoke-filled house with its maroon ceiling, my grandmother hunkered down in the couch emitting something that was not quite a color, not quite a sound, though she talked or shouted or screamed, depending on the thing that would come over her. It didn’t have a name. It made me shiver and shrink; it was cold and soon enough I watched it take over my world.
My mother ambled toward me and Gram while the Texas Chief’s silver engine shivered in the station like a pony who’d scrambled across the big plains, catching its breath. Her beauty, ivory skin—red lipstick always perfect—her throaty voice greeting me, her fingers along my cheek; the sound she emitted was wispy when she arrived, delicate as the tissue paper in her perfumed suitcases, but too soon she and her mother were shouting accusations. Mother was wrong, according to Gram; Gram was wrong, according to Mother. One thin line of words would lead to torrents of words and tears, and even screams. I learned to hide in the bedroom, hoping they would stop. Then the shattering of dishes, the sound of the world ending as they careened toward the cliff of no return, each facing the other like tattered warriors in makeup, wearing nice dresses, their pretty faces twisted. One time I ran between them and begged them to stop. Another time I bent down to pick up the pieces, but Mother stopped me.
On her yearly visits, mother would play Franz Liszt’s Liebestraum for me. “It means Song of Love,” she told me, her eyelids fluttering as her graceful pale hands swooped up and down the keyboard. The colors that had shattered the night before began to settle into place as I huddled near her warm body, wanting to soak up all this beauty before it disappeared again. The music was blue and red and swirling, passionate and promising, and then it was over. An ache began in my chest then, a feeling like an umbilical chord knotted and connected between us, and I knew in my body how wrong it was that she had left me, that she kept leaving, year after year. You try to keep the goddesses on their pedestal when you are young, because if they fall down into pieces, you shatter too. The world is too fragile for anyone. She left over and over again, climbing on that silver train, its whistle the color of smoke and the blue of a lonely night.
Back then, I didn’t know that my grandmother had left my mother when she was only six years old, the same age I was when she rescued me, seeding a generational pattern that mother would repeat. No one spoke of these things, and I would not know how perfectly the pattern had played out until after they died. No one would talk about the ghosts of the past that hovered around us. What I knew then was this shattering brokenness between them.
By the time I was twelve, my grandmother faded from her welcoming smiles and my best and only friend into a harpie with snaggled teeth, a wicked backhand with the walnut yardstick, a woman who spewed hate, forcing me to mirror her moods or be beaten, demanding my absolute allegiance. Yardstick on her lap, she had me write in my own hand hate letters she dictated to my father, signing my name. In high school, as I eyed the door for escape—I had nowhere to go—I tunneled my psyche into music. It beckoned me with its colors and its sounds, and put its arms around me where she couldn’t reach me, though she was only a few feet away. Once in awhile she’d break through the barriers of notes to swing the yardstick, but most of the time it was my moat where I was safe from her.
When I was twenty, my mother made it clear that I was not welcome as her daughter in Chicago where she lived. “No one knows I was married, so I can’t have a daughter, right?” I gazed at her in disbelief, blood draining from me as I tried to make sense of this denial. There were no colors or soft edges that could protect me, so I took it in the stomach where it would live for a long time. Yet, I didn’t take this rejection at face value. For the next thirty years, I tried to convince my mother that I was a worthy daughter, sharing my three children with her—she chose to see each one twice in her life—my degrees in music and art, my value as a therapist who could help heal others and make a difference. Through those years, I searched to understand why we were all painted with such dark colors, why such a broken and shattered family. The darkness that haunted my grandmother and mother came to rest on my shoulders and in my body, a heavy weight of muddy colors. Year by year in therapy, I would return to the grey and smoky house in the lonely plains, trying to understand why the women I loved turned from light to dark, changed like magic creatures from one thing into another, why they turned their faces away from each other, and me.
I was fifty and she was eighty. My mother, whom I had not seen for four years for the sake of self-preservation, was small on the bed, white sheets all around her, her hair resting on the pillow around a face that could still make my heart stop. She would get a lung biopsy and then be diagnosed with brain cancer. I always saw her beauty in these quiet moments, and sorrow filled my heart that as a little girl she was alone, like I was, and in some ways we had the same history. But then the edgy angry part in her arose, and she found something to criticize, and the whole crazy play started up again, but I was determined to draw upon my thirty years of therapy and make our last act different.
Again, in front of nurses and doctors, she denied I was her daughter, but I bore the stab wound quietly as I saw glances of pity fall upon me. I found out that she harassed the nurses with such nastiness the doctor ordered a psych evaluation. Finally. It had been clear for years that something was wrong with my mother.
The psychiatrist’s eyes were full of compassion as I told him about the shattered dishes and lost girls and my grandmother’s craziness. It had a name: manic-depression. “Yes, this runs in families,” he said gently. At that moment, my mother was running up and down the halls, trying to find us, to silence him, to control us as if that would stop the raging forces in her mind and body. That week my mother was admitted to the geriatric psychiatric ward. On the way, she denied I was her daughter again, but this time I understand it as her illness speaking. This thing of pain had a name. It was a disease. It was not really her. I smiled, though my heart was racing. It was official: I came from certifiably crazy people. What did that make me?
My grandmother on her deathbed asked me to forgive her for hating my father. Her dark eyes were bright and the muddy grey air that always surrounded her was gone. She seemed surrounded in light, and the room was golden. A priest had given her the last rites, forgiving her for her sins. She became the grandmother I knew when I was little again, who gazed at me with love. Two weeks later she died.
I returned to Chicago the last few days of my mother’s life because she could no longer shout at me, her powers of speech stolen by the cancer. She had denied me until then, but finally nodded when a nurse asked if I should come. I approached the room and saw someone unrecognizable in the bed, a bald woman, emaciated, her arms flying up and down randomly, eyes rolling. I backed out of the room to look at the number. It had to be the wrong room. This was no one I recognized, but I looked again. Just then she saw me, and a wild keening sound arose in her, tears burst from her eyes, and she waved her arms toward me. The grief for all we had lost, for Gram, for the wasted and painful years burst in me, and we sobbed together for a long time, our tears mingling on our bodies. I had a vision then of the unfolding of time, how it wafted back through the generations, that she and I were made of these moments that had passed between us as well as all the moments we had lost. Our lives and psyches were woven of this wispy stuff of soul and now we were together. It was like those days at the piano where the notes and their colors filled my world, and now the dark B flat and the scary D flat changed into welcoming colors of amber and gold, white light and forgiveness.
It was the beginning of the rest of my life.