One of my mother’s favorite words, as in “in cahoots,” a phrase she frequently employs in sentences such as: “Medicaid is obviously in cahoots with *DMH!” Or: “DMH is obviously in cahoots with my landlord!”
Many of the most important events of my childhood were unexperienced. Unfortunately, when things are unexperienced, they cannot be told or retold—they can barely be remembered. Technically, this is called “dissociation,” a straightforward enough term meaning that you disassociate from your surroundings. Pull out. Shut down. Close up shop. Oddly, I’ve found, the off-center focal point of many a dissociative episode can be recalled even decades later with almost perfect clarity. Memory clings to such a point with at least as much tenacity as it rejects the primary event. For example, when I was three years old, I saw my parents argue while standing in the doorway between the kitchen and their bedroom in our tiny apartment in the basement of my grandparents’ house. My father seemed both immovable and towering, also much too close to my mother, who for her part kept clawing at his face—as if she were daring him to hit her. This, eventually, he did, although I cannot actually see, through the thick haze of static, the blow. Nor can I see myself clamping onto his leg. I cannot see him peeling me off either, or throwing me across the room, but this is what happened, according to my mother, who years later would often recount this string of events like a weird mantra. All I remember for myself is the foot of my parents’ bureau on the other side of the room: a curved knob of reddish wood covered lightly in dust.
Isaac’s crib was arranged at the foot of our bed. This was back when I still let my mother into our apartment, back when David and I were sleeping downstairs in an alcove off the living room to be near the baby. She’d stopped by without calling ahead. I’d put on some water for tea, then showed her her grandson, fast asleep in his crib. His tiny, knobby legs were sticking out of his diaper, which was printed with images of a famous cartoon character based on a sponge. My mother shook her head and said: “You are so lucky. He’s so good. You’ve been lucky with both of them. They’re both such calm, happy, cheerful kids.”
Then she told me a story I’d heard many times before. It was about Tracy as a baby and how she’d been allergic to formula, hungry and colicky all the time. She told me again about the terrifying weight loss, the frequent doctors’ visits, the constant crying. And then she told me something I didn’t know.
“Sometimes I couldn’t handle it. I really couldn’t. I was so young. You have to remember. I didn’t have any role models. I didn’t know what to do. Sometimes I’d put her in her crib and leave her there. Your grandmother worked in the factory three or four days a week back then, and when she was gone, I didn’t have any help. So I just put her in her crib and pulled the shades and shut the door and left her there. For hours she used to cry. Sometimes she’d cry all day long!” My mother’s mouth was stretched into an upside-down U, her brow collapsed. Her fingers, resting on the crib railing, shook slightly. I said something about postpartum depression and rubbed her back. But these were empty gestures. If she’d been a friend, I might have understood, but she was my mother, and Tracy was my sister, and my gestures were bogus. What I wanted was for her to leave. I wanted to lie down. And when I was done lying down, I wanted to call my sister—not to tell her what I’d just learned but to send something through the phone line, time-traveling magic that doesn’t really exist (I know that!), but I wanted to send it anyway.
Isaac has a friend over after school, a boy in his first grade class. The two of them are busy making dinosaurs out of Legos when my mother knocks at the door. I’m not expecting her, but she never calls ahead because she thinks her phones are being tapped and she doesn’t want DMH to know when she’s leaving her apartment because she’s worried they’ll send someone over to search through her paperwork.
Isaac’s friend’s mother and sister have both come along as well, and the three of us—the mother, the sister, and I—are sitting on the living room floor. I am trying to teach the girl how to knit because her Game Boy has run out of batteries and she is bored. We’ve gotten through the process of casting on and she’s working on her second row when my mother knocks. I excuse myself and step out onto our porch, careful to shut the door behind me.
“Did he give you my message?”
“What message?”
“I thought so!”
She is wearing an enormous white nylon jacket. It is square shaped, and it hangs down to her knees. I’m not sure if that’s the way it’s supposed to fit, but the effect is kind of preppy and vaguely Comme des Garçons at the same time. Underneath the jacket she has on a pair of white jeans that I gave her a while back and some white platform sneakers.
“Mom, I have company. Isaac has a friend over. I can’t talk.”
“You never want to talk, but we have to talk. I don’t expect you to believe this, Kimberli, but I am very, very ill. Things are happening quickly. We need to discuss certain technicalities. You have to come over and spend a few hours with me so that we can discuss certain extremely important, factual items.”
“Like what?”
“Like life insurance.” She purses her lips then, to make sure I understand that these words are code for I’m going to die soon, you know.
“Mom, I don’t have time for this.”
“You don’t have time for your own mother?”
“I don’t have time for your endless problems, your imagined illnesses, your supposedly impending death, your paranoia.”
She takes a step backward, as if she’d been literally stunned by an actual electrical shock, puts her hand on her chest, and says: “What are you saying? You think I’m paranoid? Me? Kimberli, this is not child’s play. When are you finally going to get it? When it’s too late?”
I’m feeling pretty uncomfortable at this point because I know that Isaac’s friend’s mother and sister are in a perfect position to see me as our front door has a large glass panel in the middle of it, and beyond me they can also no doubt make out my old, frail, crazy mother in her huge white nylon jacket. And even though the door is shut, it’s also likely that they can hear us because our voices are raised. Things are heated.
“How long is this going to last?” she asks, “all this anger, all these boundaries?” Then she begins to cry, and says, “Oh, Kimmy, if you only knew how much I miss you loving me.”
I pause to consider the unusual construction of this sentence. Then the phone starts ringing. I tell her I have to go, but when I turn to open the door, she grabs my arm. I pull away. “That’s probably Isabella calling. I have to go.”
“Don’t you dare!”
“I have to. It’s Isabella!”
“Don’t!” my mother shouts. I go inside anyway, shutting the door behind me, leaving her standing alone on the porch as I am now in the habit of doing. She stands there with her arms at her sides staring down at something. Her feet? The doorknob? As I run for the phone, I flash what I’m pretty sure is a shit-eating grin at my son’s friend’s mother, then pick up the receiver. Just as I’d predicted, it’s Isabella. She’s called to tell me that her play rehearsal is over and she’s coming straight home because she has to work on a science project that’s due tomorrow. I somehow hear her say these things even as my mother pushes the door open, not all the way but wide enough to shout inside: “Your shrink is destroying your mind, you know. She’s destroying your mind!”
I’m not sure this counts as a memory at all. I know only that we’re eating something, my mother and I. Toast perhaps. Something that takes a bit of concentration. We’re sitting at our kitchen table downstairs, in the basement apartment, and for some reason I see us, all these years later, bathed in sunlight. But who knows? It was so long ago. It might have been raining. It might have been carrot sticks or cookies. The only thing I remember with anything approaching certainty is the act of chewing. Doggedly, doggedly chewing. And somewhere nearby, yet very far away, a baby is making complicated noises: ragged strings of spit and air.
My mother wore a fuchsia pink peignoir—layer upon layer of semitransparent chiffon trimmed with matching ostrich feathers—the morning she sliced her left wrist with my father’s razor blade. She was twenty-one years old. I was three and a half. Tracy was just learning to walk. I remember the peignoir most of all but also many legs—a whole forest of adult legs through which I battled my way toward the bathroom door. My father, his parents, his sisters—they were all crowded there, shouting, pounding. At one point my father threw himself against the door, but this did nothing, so Grandpa Joe threw himself against it. Over and over the two of them ran at the door until it finally splintered in its frame and someone reached inside to undo the lock. My mother stood there in her beautiful peignoir, holding her arm away from her body as the blood leapt in spurts. On the floor, near her feet, it ran along the right angles of grout in between the tiles. Later there were two paramedics who tied her arm off above her wrist with a tourniquet so the blood would stop jumping. But it was all wrong! They’d tied the wrong arm! I kept shouting at them to put the tourniquet on the other arm. One of them was young and kind. The other old and gruff. “Please!” I screamed, hopping from foot to foot. “It’s the wrong arm!”
“Shhhhh!” said the older one. “This is how you do it.”
The dominant emotion I hold in my heart (or whatever somatic port emotions actually reside in) for my mother is a complex thing: tender and livid, destructive, oppressive. To consider my feelings for her—even fleetingly—late at night is to experience brief but richly nauseating pulses of something like hopelessness, only more deathy.
She buys cleaning products the way I buy luxury bath products, which is to say enthusiastically but with the discretion of a connoisseur. She collects them in large numbers, often in the largest sizes available, sizes you didn’t even know existed, sizes that are cartoonishly, industrially enormous, in containers you might be surprised to find even in a city hospital. She likes all the basics—bleach, ammonia, scrubbing powders—but also enjoys experimenting with more unusual products, such as ionized dust wipes or gels that claim to draw out deeply engrained mildew. My mother doesn’t simply amass these things but actually uses them because she really loves to clean and maintains a strict philosophy of cleaning, which boils down to one essential idea: it’s of utmost importance to clean deeply. Surface cleaning, she has told me I don’t know how many times, is next to pointless because anything can look clean on top but be absolutely filthy just beneath.
Cabbage is a cheap and useful vegetable. I like the homey, simple taste of it in nearly every form—boiled, braised, fermented, and pickled. However, I cannot eat or buy or prepare cabbage without the certain visitation of a very old memory. In it Grandma Bella stands at the kitchen counter. She is about to cut up a large, pale head of green cabbage. The sun streams in through the window above the sink. I know this because my father stands over his mother, screaming, and tiny spheres of spit fly from his mouth, and these are illuminated by the sunlight. His face is red, his mouth huge, his black Buddy Holly–style eyeglasses wildly askew. His mother is much shorter than he. She is small and round, and she is also, at this point, the person I trust and love most in the world. On her olive-skinned arms are constellations of smooth white dots from the wax she handles in the munitions factory she works at three days a week. The dots are not technically part of this memory (I just thought I’d mention them), but my grandmother’s smallness and her roundness are because she seems especially these things with my father towering over her.
I am in this memory too, at least physically—or maybe I should say proprioceptively, by which I mean that I feel myself to be exceedingly tiny, to be, in essence, all eyes—a low perspective gazing up at the scene. The emotions that fill me as I look on the adults and the sun and the cabbage and the knife are a fluctuating combination of dread and something like wonder. For instance, when my father grabs the cabbage his mother is about to chop and hurls it against the kitchen floor, I am completely awestruck. The act makes no sense at all to me. I doubt I could have been more surprised had he removed his own head and thrown it at the floor, had it been his head that smacked against the linoleum, then spun crazily around the room, his head that my grandmother eventually retrieved, shaking slightly, and put back in its place.
My mother has always described her father as a “Black Swede,” meaning dark, short, and wiry, like the so-called Black Irish. But my grandmother, when she first met her future husband in New Orleans, refused to believe he was Swedish at all until she saw his papers. His hair was too curly, too dark, his skin too brown, his Portuguese (he’d joined that country’s merchant marines when he was fourteen) too fluent.
It’s odd—really odd, I think—but in our family Swedishness is infused with an almost mystical quality. For instance, the other night on the phone (my ear sweats she talks so much, so nonstop, for so long; it aches when I finally hang up), after telling me about the parasites she’s been massaging out of her gums, my mother exclaimed: “All I can say is, thank God for my Swedish constitution! If not for that, I’d be dead!”
In people with conversion disorder, difficult, painful, or entirely unbearable emotions are sublimated or even transformed into mysterious physical ailments. For example, my mother’s systemic bacterial infection, her concerns about worms living in her left eye, sperm-like organisms proliferating in the glands all over her body, her vestibular issues and deafness in one ear, unusual funguses in her mucus membranes, strange objects nested in the roots of her teeth, and so on and so forth, all seem to me the likely manifestations of a hefty case of conversion disorder.
Before I came to understand a couple of interesting facts about gratitude—for instance, that it’s a remarkably good tool for getting calm and feeling okay about a wide range of emotions, experiences, and realities, and also that it can be practiced just as good posture or effective joke delivery can be practiced—I relied on baked goods to accomplish roughly the same thing. Indeed, baked goods remain a hardcore habit of mine. I am particularly fond of making and eating cookies but also love to make and eat fruit pies and, on occasion, simple, old-fashioned cakes: devil’s food, coconut, burnt sugar, buttermilk, poppy seed. Call me retro, but being a good baker makes me feel like a good mother, and being a good mother makes me feel like a worthwhile human being. It’s my hope and sincere desire that my children, as they grow older, will not view my at times rather frenzied activities in the kitchen as a more or less neurotic emotional construction but instead will cherish memories of me at the oven, spatula in hand, with scents of chocolate, vanilla, mace, lemon, cinnamon, and honey redolent in the air, and with tastes and textures that they might, at some much later date in their lives, recall as incomparably sweet and yielding—tastes of childhoods safe, unhindered, and essentially happy.
When I ask how she knows there are worms in her left eye, she says: “I know because I have actually pulled a worm out of my eye. It was super long and super skinny, and it just kept coming.” When I try, delicately, to suggest that maybe what she pulled from her eye wasn’t a worm but something else, I leave the “something else” unstated because she’d be insulted by the word imaginary, and the word capillary (which is the only other possibility to occur to me) seems too gruesome to verbalize.
“Why?” sighs my mother. “Why are you so invested in this idea I’m just this crazy, crazy lady? I’m telling you, this thing was alive, and it was moving, and it came out with hardly any tugging at all!”
Tap-tap-tap. She knocks very lightly on the screen door because she’s still afraid of waking up Isaac even though he stopped taking naps years ago and in any case he’s out of the house since it’s a school day and only lunchtime. Because it’s impossible to get her to stop talking once she gets going, I don’t answer right away but instead rush to fill a laundry basket with a load of damp clothes from the machine. I might as well hang up some laundry while she talks my ear off, is my reasoning.
When I open the door, laundry basket in hand, neither of us makes any mention of her previous visit. Instead, she says: “Oh, that’s perfect, Kimmy. Those will dry in a jiffy on a day like this. I just love the smell of clothes that have been hung outside to dry. There’s nothing like it! So fresh and sweet.”
We walk over to the clothesline stretched across our backyard, and I begin clipping things to it as she speaks. It’s not that I don’t listen. I do. Sort of. But in the same way I might listen to a buzz saw or a leaf blower. I hear certain words, certain all-too-familiar words—teeth, doctors, landlord, DMH—and these alert me to the fact that nothing new is being said. But at a certain point my mother starts talking about something that piques my interest, something I haven’t heard before concerning the psych ward she was committed to after her first suicide attempt.
“God, I hated that place so much,” she says. She is helpfully holding out a pair of Isaac’s shorts for me to hang on the line, but she’s gripping them kind of hard, so I have to tug them out of her hand. “I was so stupid! So young! I didn’t understand that the only way I was ever going to get out of that place was to lie. My doctor—he was such a pathetic little man, such a short little itty-bitty man, classic Napoleon complex!—he used to ask me every day the same stupid, meaningless question. Are you ready to go home and be a good wife and a loving mother, Linda? And every day, I refused to answer him. I had no idea what he was doing. His treatment of me was absurdly minimal. Criminal, really. It consisted of just two things. Two! Tranquilizers and that same stupid question, over and over.” Making her voice go comically deep and adding what I think might be a German accent she says, “Are you ready to go home and be a good wife and a loving mother, Linda?”
“So what happened?”
“Well, one day I finally—finally—got another patient to tell me what I had to do. She set me straight. Said the bastard just needed me to say it for his form or something. And so the next day, when he asked if I was ready to go home and be a good wife and a loving mother, I said yes. He said he wanted to hear me say the words, so I said, ‘Yes-I-am-ready-to-go-home-and-be-a-good-wife-and-a-loving-mother.’ And boom—what do you know—the next day I was released.”
The small two-bedroom apartment my parents rented after my mother was released from the hospital was part of a large brick complex of similar apartments arranged around a central lawn divided by half a dozen concrete walkways littered with children’s toys—balls and dolls and chalk and bikes. I spent a lot of time watching my mother clean in this apartment, which she did with formidable energy and an impressive array of tools. For instance, to mop the kitchen floor, she used a gigantic super-absorbent sponge that looked like a massive chunk of caramel-flavored cake, a thick rubber mat to protect her knees, rubber gloves that reached to her elbows, a kerchief to hold back her hair, and, of course, a bucket filled with soapy, sharp-smelling water. I often begged her to let me help with this chore, but she said I was too small, I’d just get in the way. I was allowed to watch, but this, obviously, was a tremendous disappointment. After all, watching someone mop the floor, no matter how secretly relieved you might be simply to keep an eye on them so as to make sure they’re not about to kill themselves, is not exactly a three-year-old’s idea of fun. I had given up hope of ever getting to participate in this fascinating operation when one day my mother came home with a bag full of wonderful surprises: a miniature bucket, a miniature sponge, a miniature rubber mat, a miniature pair of gloves, and a miniature kerchief. The kerchief I remember as being especially beautiful, made of a fine-wale blue corduroy and dotted with white flowers.
That day we mopped the kitchen floor together, and even now, when I recall that ancient afternoon, I feel something molten—something golden, warm. Maybe this is happiness. Or maybe it’s sunlight because in fact the sun was shining that day, glittering on the soap bubbles that floated in the air then settled in quivering half-domes on the countertops and the linoleum tiles and the sides of the bucket. The kitchen was full of this rambunctious light. It ricocheted off everything, exploding in white stars on the spotless windows, in the watery streaks on the floor, in the lenses of mother’s glasses, and on her straight white teeth whenever she smiled her slightly crooked smile.
A photograph of my fourth birthday reveals a listless gathering of three children and two young women—presumably mothers. There are few strips of crepe paper strung above our dining room table and, stuck to the wall, a single red balloon. I perch at the edge of my chair, ready to blow out the candles on a store-bought cake, but I might just as well be in a doctor’s office waiting to get a shot. No one is smiling.
That morning I’d received a new pair of Buster Brown shoes—sturdy little oxfords made of brown leather with bright red laces. I liked them very much, mostly because of the laces because I was interested in all things red. Red was a song around me—a mysterious pattern. Red was the round rug in our living room, red were my sister’s bow-shaped plastic barrettes, red was the charm at the end of my mother’s favorite necklace, red were the stripes on my father’s athletic socks, red was my velvet jumper, and red were the buttons on my soft white winter coat. To this day I feel certain there’s some good thing hidden in red, though I’ve never discovered exactly what it might be or why it chooses red.
Later that afternoon, after the party, while Tracy was napping, I played with my second favorite gift: a musical jewelry box with a pop-up ballerina hidden inside. I can still see this tiny plastic figure perfectly, chiseled in every particular. Standing next to my bureau, I repeatedly opened and shut the lid of the music box to watch her pop into view. I was mesmerized by her uncanny spinning, the tinny music, and the mechanism hidden in the base of the box that generated that music: a studded brass cylinder that also spun and, in spinning, resisted a stiff row of plinking metal tines. The ballerina’s red lips were printed slightly off-center from her plastic mouth, and I was preoccupied by the question of whether she would be prettier with her lips centered or less pretty. I remember this as well: when I heard my father come home from work, I slammed the box shut and ran like hell to hide.
The next day my mother was gone. Aunt Inga had picked her up in the middle of the night, while the rest of us were asleep, and driven her to the airport, only we didn’t know this—at least I didn’t. All I knew was that something had made a huge crashing noise in the living room very early in the morning, when it was still barely light outside. When I got up to investigate, I found my father standing near a hole in the wall. He was wearing pajama bottoms, and in one hand he held a piece of paper.
“Your mother’s gone,” he said. He was breathing heavily.
“What do you mean gone?”
The man terrified me, but the question had to be asked.
“Gone!” he screamed, and I booked it back to my bed as fast as I could.