The thing I worry about with my mother’s eye isn’t worms, it’s shingles. Because it’s true—her left eye does not look healthy. It is often red, and the skin around it is very chapped, and both of these are symptoms of shingles when that disease affects the eye. Shingles of the eye is a highly contagious disease, which if left untreated for too long can cause blindness. But when I explain these things to my mother, she yells: “Don’t be stupid! Shingles don’t give you worms!”
For most of my life, I’m not sure why, I had miles of fuse with my mother. Miles and miles and miles and miles of fuse. In fact, for many years my reserves of patience for her seemed virtually endless. But that changed all of a sudden one Thanksgiving about four years ago. David and I were hosting, and after some debate we decided to invite my mother. When I asked if she could come, she said: “Oh, Kimmy. Thank you so much! I’m so excited! It’s going to be so wonderful!” She even asked if she could arrive early in order to help prepare the meal, which she said was half the fun. So, for the week leading up, she called daily in order to pin down our plans, checking to see what she could bring and when she should come and also to ask what sort of gifts I thought the kids might like because she’d forgotten both of their birthdays that summer. She said she’d like to make a spinach dish that had been her specialty years ago, a dark silky mess of chopped spinach in cream sauce topped with slivers of hard-boiled egg. She also said she’d give me tips on the gravy because she makes a “mean” one, but when I said I already knew how to make good gravy, she said that really she’d just be my sous-chef.
“There’s just so much to do on Thanksgiving. You can tell me, ‘Chop this, chop that.’ I’ll do whatever you say. Dishes. Table setting. Watching the kids. Whatever!”
The truth is, I was getting kind of excited about having her over. She seemed so happy about it, so unusually centered and even considerate. We’d invited only three other people, friends of ours named Jess and Peter and their daughter, Sophie. Although we’d known Jess and Peter for many years and they are among our closest friends, they had never met my mother. So I warned them ahead of time that she might be a little hard to deal with—hyper and extremely talkative, maybe about inappropriate things.
“Don’t worry,” said Jess. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
We said we’d eat at four o’clock, and my mother told me she’d come over at one thirty to help get things ready. Because she is notoriously late, I asked her to call before she left so that I’d know when to actually expect her. At two o’clock she phoned to say she was getting into her car. She lives fifteen minutes away, so at three o’clock, when she still hadn’t arrived, I called to see if she was okay. She said she’d forgotten something, but she was leaving that very moment, in fact she was getting into her car as we spoke, then she slammed her car door to prove it. At four o’clock Jess, Peter, and Sophie arrived with a salad, two bottles of wine, and a loaf of homemade bread. The turkey was behind schedule, but we had plenty to eat with the appetizers, which included a mushroom salad Grandma Bella used to make: quartered button mushrooms, chunks of Pecorino, olive oil, salt, pepper, chopped parsley, lemon juice.
“This is amazing!” said Peter, about the salad. “Jess, we must remember this recipe. It’s so simple and good.”
At five thirty I texted my mother to tell her we were starting the meal without her. She texted back:
Soooooo sorry. Unexpected delays. Just down the street b 5 mins.
I don’t like turkey, but everyone else said it was good. I’d prepared it with a stuffing that included garlic, basil, and parmesan cheese, which is how I remembered one of my great aunts on my father’s side making it once.
“So, I guess your mother’s not coming?” Jess asked halfway through dinner. I shrugged and said it was probably for the best. Isabella told Sophie (who is exactly her age), “My grandma is a little funny.” We cleared the plates, and Jess and Peter asked to look at the pies I’d made so they could at least ogle them since they’d promised to have dessert at Jess’s cousin’s house.
After they left, David, the kids, and I decided to take a walk before starting dessert. I texted my mother once more to say we’d be out for a while but that if she wanted pie, she could come by around eight. She texted back:
Apple?
It was cold outside, but we walked for a long time anyway. The streets were virtually empty, and the air felt as if it were full of tiny, invisible needles of ice. At one point we wandered into the main commercial district of B—, and for some reason I remember this part of our excursion with tremendous tenderness. I remember, for instance, that as we crossed a deserted Beacon Street against the light, David took my hand and said, “You can’t really expect her to do what she says she’s going to.” I said that it had been a beautiful meal anyway. I asked if he’d liked the turkey.
“Honestly, I wasn’t crazy about the garlic stuffing,” he said. I told him Grandma Bella would never have done it that way, even though her sister had. She’d always done her turkeys with just the most basic sage and sausage stuffing. He said that was his favorite kind of stuffing too, and I resolved to do it that way from then on.
When we got home, I put on the kettle for tea and checked my cell phone, but there were no messages. The pies, if I do say so myself, were excellent. One apple, one squash. We ate thin slivers with whipped cream while watching Pink Panther II. It was about nine thirty—we were halfway through the movie—when I heard a faint knocking at the door. I said, “She’s here,” and David said he didn’t hear anything, but then she knocked again and he asked if I wanted to let her in and I said not really but I guess we should, so he went to open the door, and she came in talking a mile a minute about the bottle of fancy wine she’d brought.
“It’ll go great with the turkey!”
David asked if she’d like some pie, and she said: “Well, what I was really hoping for was some turkey and mashed rutabaga—I’ve been dreaming about mashed rutabaga all week long! Is there any left? I’m just dying for mashed rutabaga.”
“We ate hours ago, Linda. Everything’s been put away.”
“Just a little plate?”
From across the room I said, “No!” Then I marched into the kitchen, cut her two slices of pie, dolloped them with whipped cream, and put the plate in front of her. She picked at these while telling Isaac about all the presents she was going to get him for Christmas. As I listened to her speak, my stomach started lurching around. This is often the case when I’m near my mother. You can actually see it move. That night it was so bad that I couldn’t stand up straight. I just wanted her to leave so we could get back to our movie, but I didn’t say so because I could feel the anger bubbling inside of me and I knew that if I opened my mouth, what came out if it would be ugly, and I didn’t want to be like that in front of my kids, so instead I hobbled over to the ladder that leads to David’s and my sleeping loft, climbed upstairs, and crawled under the covers of our bed to wait for her to leave. After about half an hour David started shepherding her toward the door.
“The kids are tired. It’s late. It’s been a long day.” It took him ten minutes to get her out. Right before she left, she shouted, “Good-bye, Kimberli!” But this was barbed because she only uses my full name to indicate displeasure.
Once she was gone, I hobbled back downstairs and told Isaac that he shouldn’t get his hopes up about the presents.
“I know,” he said.
David asked if I was okay. I said, “Let’s just watch the movie.” He turned it back on, then leaned over to give me a kiss, but I pulled away. I said, “I’m done. I’m done with her. For real.” He said, “That’s probably good. There’s really no point. It doesn’t help her, and it only hurts you.” Once again he leaned over to give me a kiss, and again I pulled away, but then I leaned back.
A state full of sadists. A bona fide hellhole. A living nightmare, where everyone is in cahoots with everyone else and nobody ever gets off her back.
Once, many years ago, I helped my mother run an especially exhausting and fruitless errand. I was in my midthirties when I put Isabella in her car seat and drove an hour and a half south of Boston to visit a tiny jewelry store, where I was supposed to act as a kind of character witness for my mother while she laid out a handful of blurry Polaroid photographs and unpacked a shoebox full of expensive rings and pins on the glass counter in front of the store owner, all the while spewing a nonstop verbal explosion of deeply paranoid logic. Needless to say, things ended badly, but it took a really long time—almost two hours—because the jewelry store owner was an exceedingly polite man.
At the conclusion of this mortifying exercise in futility, I was not only humiliated but exhausted and hungry, and Isabella had long ago passed cranky. Luckily, we found an old-fashioned diner just a few doors down from the jewelry store, and there we ordered three grilled cheese sandwiches, two iced teas, and a glass of chocolate milk. Once we’d finished eating, the waitress brought us our check, which—I just so happen to remember—was for the very modest sum of twelve dollars and eighty-six cents. After glancing at this figure, my mother pushed the bill toward me. I was annoyed, but of course it wasn’t that much money, so I tried to let it go. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the fact that I still recall the precise amount, I have not as yet managed to succeed on that score.
After lunch we took a walk across the street, where there was an old graveyard on a hill. This graveyard was of the type New England is known for, with slate headstones tilting at odd angles and inscriptions so old they’re often worn away and, when still legible, tend to describe tragically short life spans. It was a beautiful place—peaceful and cool and quiet, shaded by tall maples whose crowns merged to create a canopy of leaves that rustled every so often in the breeze. Overhead, pigeons flew in deep arcs. As we walked, I bumped my sleeping daughter’s stroller gently over the buckled brick path, and I remember thinking, This isn’t so bad . . . walking with my mother . . . talking . . . it’s actually kind of nice. Then, for a little while, it got un-nice. Then it got nice again. And then—I forget how it came up, but at a certain point my mother turned to me for some reason and said: “You know, you can write about me if you want, Kimmy. I don’t mind. I know I’m your material.”
The memory was gone—for years, decades. But then, suddenly, it’s here. We’re at the table eating macaroni and cheese, the kind that comes out of a box, when Isabella complains about not being able to enjoy things like corn on the cob and candied apples because of her braces. Beyond the windows, behind my children, I can see our yard, and beyond our yard I can see the grounds of their grade school, with its track and its baseball diamonds, its basketball court, its picnic tables and swings. I know better, which is why I try (briefly) to reason with myself, but it doesn’t work. I dive in anyway.
“When I had braces, do you know what Mormor used to do if she didn’t like what I was saying or how I was acting? Can you guess?”
I ask as if we were playing a fun game. My children look a little worried, and a voice in my head tells me to shut up, but I don’t listen. “She used to take my face in her hands and squeeze my cheeks. Really hard. Rub them back and forth, back and forth, squishing them into my braces.” I imitate my mother crushing my cheeks between her hands, but it’s weird because I’m trying to be both me, as a kid with braces, and my mother, with the hands. Then I laugh. Ha ha.
“That’s not funny,” says Isaac.
“That’s awful,” says Isabella.
“Well, you know Mormor,” I say, trying for an airy tone.
In my embarrassingly large collection of self-help books, I have found very little that’s truly illuminating on the subject of mental illness. Thich Nhat Hanh, for instance, often speaks of “difficult” people, though not of mentally ill people, and there is of course an enormous distinction to be made. Generally speaking, most authors of the sorts of books that fill my collection, no matter how lucid they may be on the broadest spiritual truths, are content to say things that are plainly half-assed when it comes to mental illness. For instance, one idea frequently articulated is that difficult people ought to be seen in a special light, one that reveals them as valuable teachers who can reveal important truths about things like patience and empathy and also about our own neediness and other shortcomings.
Once I heard Eckhart Tolle say something completely ridiculous on this subject in a YouTube video. Generally speaking, I like Eckhart Tolle. I have learned a lot from his YouTube channel. But I remember thinking that his rambling answer to this particular question (“What is the purpose of mental illness? How can something that is consciousness depriving have its necessary place and function?”), asked by a nervous and pained-looking young woman, was absurd in the extreme. I remember growing increasingly irate as I listened to him go on and on about the supposed “purpose” of mental illness. And yet afterward something curious happened. His answer stuck in my head, and over time I began to understand what he was really saying. He was saying that mental illness, as it manifests in the individual, is actually a reflection of a wider, vaster, deeper illness in the human species as a whole and, for this reason, should be understood as an indication of humanity’s lack of compassion or insight or maturity because we are all connected, and ultimately, if one of us is mentally ill, all of us must to some extent, on some deep, psychic level, share that fate. At least this is what I thought he said. But when I finally re-watched the video some time later, I realized that I’d gotten it all wrong—he actually was talking in circles. Still, I like the answer I thought he gave. In any case it remains the only explanation that makes any sense to me at all.
There’s a predictable narrative arc to the dreams I used to have about my grandmother’s house. It always opened the same way, for instance, with great news: I inherited the property. What a boon!
In this dream I used to drive straight down to New Jersey and roll up my sleeves. Not surprisingly, the house was always a mess: dirty, even disgusting. There were smells and sights to make me gag, but I had vision; I could see past the surface grime. And the thing of it was, now that the house was mine, I realized how badly I needed it! It was the answer—or would be, if only it weren’t so dirty—to all of my problems. Free housing: who could possibly say no to that? Plus, we were having another baby, or David had just been transferred to New Jersey, or we really, really, really needed a kitchen garden, so badly it was a matter of life or death . . .
In these dreams, as in real life, the land all around Grandma Ellen’s house was green and gentle. But in my dreams it was always summer and always sunlit, and sometimes there were woods covering a hill that wasn’t actually there, and sometimes there was a lake or a mountain range. But the house was always the focal point because it offered such unheard-of potential. Maybe that’s why I loved this dream so much. Or maybe I loved it because it allowed me to revisit my grandmother’s house. In either case I looked forward to this recurring dream in much the same way I look forward to the first big snow of winter—as a magical occurrence. And I missed it when it evaded me for too long, as it has for the past several years.
But back when the dream recurred more reliably, it always unfolded the same way. In it I really threw myself into the cleaning. I would clean nonstop. But no matter how hard I cleaned, nothing ever changed. The dirt was just so deep. The dirt was just so dirty. So dirty I might work for hours scrubbing a single corner of one room, and yet the minute I turned around, it was only to discover exactly how enormous the task at hand really was, how much bigger than I. Slowly, I’d come to realize that I’d never finish. Of course, it didn’t help that things kept changing. For example, as soon as I turned my back to my one little scrubbed square foot of floor or wall or what have you, it would instantly become dirty again. It would become *filthy.
But then, just as I was about to give up, something very good would always happen: I’d find the secret room. Or else sometimes it was a garden, and in the garden there’d be a secret shed, which would become the secret room. Sometimes the room was in the basement, and sometimes it was in the attic, and sometimes it was off the porch. Sometimes it was simply a matter of cutting a hole for a door and the room would be right there, where it always was. The point is, no matter how many times I dreamed this dream, it was always exhilarating when I discovered the secret room because this room was always very special. Sometimes it reminded me of Café Pamplona in Harvard Square, and sometimes it reminded me of England. Once it was on the seashore and Seamus Heaney lived next door. And for some reason this room—and only this room—I could actually clean, even if the rest of the house remained forever dirty. This room I could really spiff up. There were even times when I found more than a single room, when I stumbled across an entire suite of rooms, a suite so large that the original house could be used for nothing but dead storage.
Every time I dreamed this dream it was a little different but not much, at least until the last time, when things ended badly. This was five or six years ago—right around the time Isaac was born. I remember this: an ominous feeling pervaded the whole thing. And during the long, exhausting process of cleaning, before I got to the secret room, I unplugged some kind of weird storage compartment. It was like a boarded-up closet, only high above my head, and as soon as I did this, something loud and toxic and airborne came streaming out of it, spraying out of it as if out of a gigantic aerosol can. I ducked, of course, but the sense I had in the dream was that I’d been badly damaged by this stuff, whatever it was, permanently damaged somewhere inside.
Little puzzles, little toys, things to play around with in your brain, things that stand for other things that with the right mental shift can turn into still other things or even back into the original things. A glossary, for example, can be seen as a messy and confused attempt at storytelling as well as the exact opposite—an insistence on orderliness and organization indicating an enormous level of control freakishness borne of a profound sense of impotence stemming from an exceptionally heavy pair of *boots.
I was laid up in bed, sick with the flu. My mother was away on a business trip, so my father stepped in to take care of me. He did so with surprising tenderness. For example, at one point he brought me a bowl of homemade chicken soup, at another a plate of saltines and a glass of room-temperature ginger ale. At still another he put his hand—unfamiliar, soft, dry—on my forehead to check for a fever. Perhaps it was after this brief, slightly embarrassing contact that I asked him to shut the door. He paused in gathering up my used tissues to make a joke. It was a very good joke, perfectly timed and low-key, because my father’s humor, when it does surface, is like that. In addition, the joke was in French, which is a language I was (and remain) deeply enamored of and one I assumed he didn’t know the first thing about, but apparently he did, because his accent was pretty good.
“Je t’adore aussi,” he said.
My mother’s apartment is about a quarter-mile away from the Charles River, which is why, from the bay window in her living room, you can just catch a gray glimpse of it, where it runs parallel to the Mass Turnpike for a while. It is near this window in her living room that something strange is happening to one of the walls: it’s begun to belly out, and the paint, where the wall is bulging, has begun to sag so that it looks like wrinkled skin, and in the creases of these wrinkles there are fine black lines that appear to be mildew. My mother has a special term for what’s happening to the wall, but I forget what it is. It’s a technical term that she looked up on the internet, and she says that this technical thing that’s happening to the wall in her living room is an indication of internal rot on account of excess moisture because of the proximity of the river and that her landlord knows perfectly well what’s going on—he knows all about this technical thing—but he doesn’t want to do anything to fix the situation because he wants her out because she complains about the neighbor’s cats too much and also because she knows he’s spying on her and because she refuses to turn a blind eye to numerous safety violations in the building overall. Eventually, she says, the wall will simply fall down, probably on top of her, and at that point her landlord will be under no legal obligation to house her. “He has it all planned out.”
She’s been complaining about this situation for more than a year, and although I have always doubted the veracity of her account, it’s not until I come by to drop off a large, heavy box from Williams Sonoma that she had, for some reason, shipped to our address instead of her own, that I suspect she might really have a mildew problem because it’s only then that I notice two small machines in her living room set directly under the bulge. These look like humidifiers with upturned spouts, aimed right at the wall, which is why I say: “Why do you have humidifiers under that bulge in the wall? Won’t they just make it worse?” She says, “Those are de-humidifiers.” And I say: “Oh. They look just like humidifiers. That’s funny.” And she says, “Well, I have things to do,” and practically pushes me out the door.
Over the years all the stories my mother’s told me about her childhood have come to take up a lot of room in my brain. By now they’ve all fused together to make an extended landscape, a kind of mental diorama. There are many people scattered throughout this map. My maternal grandfather is there, for instance, as is Grandma Ellen, and so, of course, is my mother when she was just a child, and all of her siblings are there too. There are several neighbors, some dogs, a few horses, a hermit, a handful of crickets, a bus full of kids, an unkind teacher, a cheerleading squad, and, of course, there’s my father standing on line at a movie theater when he was still just a boy and he saw my mother for the first time . . . There are countless details glittering all over the place: tiny bottles of nail polish, larger ones of vodka, a wooden headboard, some raw potatoes, a slice of damp bread, an old yellow dress, a pair of red canvas sneakers, a white woven blanket, a box full of thin mints, a pot roast, an ironing board, a blue chair, a plate of raw beef, a fistful of candy . . . All of it’s packed in my brain, serving, as far as I can tell, no purpose. I mean, what am I supposed to do with something like the story she once told me about the time Grandma Ellen showed her, when she was no more than eight or nine years old, one of her miscarriages floating in the toilet bowl?
“Come and see,” she said (my mother told me—so long after the fact, sitting in one of her rooms in one of the psych wards in one of the hospitals in which I have visited her over the years). Grandma Ellen wept as she took her daughter by the hand and led her into the bathroom, where she pointed out the wasted miracle floating in the pink water: ten nearly microscopic toes, ten impossibly small fingers, the almost invisible slub of a nose—all bright red. She was crying, and my mother, kneeling by her side, was crying too, though I suspect for different reasons. My grandmother showed the miniature corpse to my mother, and decades later my mother showed the miniature corpse to me. I can see it that clearly.
We’re at Grandma Ellen’s house, and the meal appears to be more or less over: a couple of empty plates, a few bottles of beer, an ashtray, some crusts of bread, are all that’s left on the table. My mother’s talking to Aunt Inga, leaning over her in a domineering way (although it occurs to me that maybe it only looks like this—maybe she’s just getting up from the table). Aunt Elsa, chewing something and glancing sidelong at her sisters, is apparently riding some great, barely controlled wave of annoyance. Emily, Uncle Lucas’s girlfriend, a woman I adored, is dancing into the room with a cup of coffee in her hand. (Why is it that Emily dancing into the room with a cup of coffee in her hand is so real to me? Even the precise shade of milk in that coffee seems absolute.) Mrs. Anders, my grandmother’s neighbor, in brown pants, a blonde wig, and bright shaggy pink slippers, is bouncing somebody’s baby on her knee. And I’m there too, sitting in a blue-and-white lawn chair, reaching a hand across the table. My head is tilted in the direction of Emily as I watch her dance into my memory.
All of these people are oriented toward the table, even if not seated at it. Only my father, in the unfocused foreground, sits alone and angled away from the rest of us. He’s staring off, out of the frame of the photograph, through the semi-opaque plastic covering of the window in my grandmother’s kitchen. He’s heavy here, though not as heavy as he will eventually become. In one hand he holds a glass. It’s almost empty.
The reason I think my mother hasn’t given up her license voluntarily, as she has always maintained, but has had it revoked is because I know something she doesn’t know I know: she had an accident right before she decided to opt out. I know about this accident because David saw it, only she doesn’t know he saw it. This was maybe a year and a half ago. David called me from the street sounding breathless and furtive. Nothing at all like he usually sounds.
“God, I hope she can’t see me.”
“Who?”
“Your mother!”
“Where are you?”
“I’m walking. I don’t think she sees me. I feel so guilty. The cops are there.”
I told him to slow down and start from the beginning, so he took a deep breath and explained that he’d been outside getting lunch in the neighborhood where he works, and had been waiting to cross the street at the corner of a large intersection where five roads converge when he heard someone lean hard on their horn.
“There was this huge BANG! At first I thought, what kind of idiot would do that? because there was a car that had tried to cut across two lanes of traffic. They wanted to make a right-hand turn, so they just cut across as soon as the light was green. But then I looked closer and I thought, Oh my god, that’s Linda.”
“It was my mother?”
“Yes! For a second I thought I was seeing things, but it’s definitely her. It’s her car, the old gray Honda, and I could see her in the driver’s seat. She looked all nervous and worried. God, I have this sick feeling in my stomach. Probably I should have stayed and helped. The other driver was totally pissed off, of course. There was all this smoke. Oh my god, I feel so guilty. She’s probably still there.”
“Are you a hundred percent sure it’s her?”
“Positive.”
“What did you do?”
“I just turned around. Now I’m walking in the other direction.”
This, I knew, was probably smart. Probably sensible. Because to get embroiled in my mother’s problems is to waste many, many hours, and there’s never any payoff, even for her. It’s also very likely what I would have done had I been in my husband’s shoes, standing on that corner. But to tell the truth, I’m not at all sure I’ve ever forgiven him for it.
It was obvious from the start that we couldn’t afford it—a modest split ranch ten minutes away from the yellow stucco house. But it was a nice place, in a nice neighborhood, and my mother really threw herself into it. First, she had the whole thing painted pale gray. Then she had a pine fence erected around the yard. Then she had the front hall floor covered with dark slate and the kitchen counters covered with delicate blue tiles. She sewed curtains and chair cushions, and every day after work, weather permitting, she took a gin and tonic outside to tend her flower garden in the front yard. There, over the course of the three years we lived in that house, she planted phlox and aster and lily of the valley, Japanese iris, French iris, tulips, daffodils, lilacs, rose of Sharon, allium, hydrangea, bleeding hearts, and a stand of bright pink peonies.
On the first day of my freshman year of high school, I invited a classmate over after school. My mother was home for some reason that day, and in an unusual display of domestic busyness, she decided to bake us some chocolate chip cookies. Liz, who was also new to the town that year and also a freshman, wore small pearls in her ears and had a fancy way of pronouncing certain words. For instance, she said “litrah-lee” rather than “literally.” This seemed to put my mother on guard because I noticed that pretty soon, she, too, started talking funny.
Liz and I sat at the kitchen table discussing our first day of high school. Our conversation was a bit stilted because my mother was just a few feet away, making the cookies. We could have gone down the hall to my room, but I didn’t want Liz to see it. I considered it an embarrassment, with its garish metallic wallpaper and bent-up Venetian blinds and bizarrely textured wall-to-wall carpeting with a rust-colored stain over half of it.
“It’s just an ordinary room,” I told her. “But it doesn’t feel like me yet. I’d rather stay here.”
“Please?” said Liz. “I just want a peek.”
“Let’s just sit in the kitchen.”
“Really, it’s no big deal,” she said. And then she jumped up to trot down the hallway in her designer jeans and cashmere sweater. “I’ll be right back!”
In the kitchen, waiting for her return, my mother and I said nothing to each other, although she did crank out a fairly good imitation of Liz, silently wiggling her shoulders and flipping her hair.
When she returned, Liz said: “It’s not so bad. You shouldn’t feel ashamed.” And my mother, still working on the cookies, said, “She’s not ashamed!” Then she tossed an eggshell over her shoulder. It landed on the floor with a surreal little splat. “She’s not ashamed of anything!”
A Swedish compound noun usually defined as “mother’s mother” (although I think a stricter translation might be closer to “mom-mom”), Mormor is what my mother asked we teach Isabella to call her after she was born. I liked the idea on account of my own fixation with all things Swedish, but for my kids I suspect Mormor is closer to an abstract concept than a real name indicating an actual person (much like the name Pop was to me when I was young), since they so rarely see my mother at this point. Isaac in particular understands her, I think, almost as a kind of living ghost, a fast and jumbled voice at the other end of the telephone, a fixture of confusion and loss in his mother’s mind perhaps best identified as a facial expression—an etched-in disappointment that I often catch, myself, in the bathroom mirror, one that I try to erase with the assiduous application of expensive creams and to accept with a devoted, some might even say obsessive, yoga practice.
He could shut out the world and just sit there, turned inward, a miser of regret tallying his grievances. Although he never said so, it seemed obvious that my father’s biggest regret must have been getting my mother pregnant when he was just nineteen years old, and so, by extension (according to my calculations), his biggest regret was me.
I remember a period of weeks—I was fourteen, fifteen—when his silence and stillness were at their most extreme. It was a dark time: we were going bankrupt. During these weeks my father took to sitting in a velvet-covered armchair in his study for hours on end, whole days even, on the weekends, staring into the vague middle distance, refusing to speak. I fought with my mother almost every day at that point, but I never confronted my father (the occasional throwing of things notwithstanding). In fact, we barely spoke. But his habit of slumping in that chair and exuding all that funky black energy really bothered me, and one day as I walked past him I hissed, under my breath, “I don’t know why he has to be so goddamned morose!” I said it like that, in the third person, but he didn’t bat an eyelash. It was only my mother, who happened to be around the corner, in the kitchen, who reacted.
“That’s it!” she said, grabbing my arm. “That’s it! That’s exactly the right word! I’ve been trying to think of it for years!”
She looks a little like Michael Jackson’s wacky white sister in this picture. She’s got gloves on, for one thing—long white rubber gloves that reach all the way to her elbows. Also, a white oxford shirt buttoned up to the neck. Her nose is dwarfed by a pair of enormous sunglasses, while her hair, which is apparently in the awkward stages of an out-growing perm, lies flat at the crown of her head but gets fluffier and fluffier as it descends past her shoulders. She’s in the backyard, picking a path through some kind of muck, arms raised for balance. So, yes, she looks wacky, but she also looks happy because my mother truly loves cleaning, and whatever it is she’s fumigating or sterilizing or scouring or scraping out there in our yard seems to be an especially rewarding challenge.
To roughly paraphrase the Mayo Clinic website, Munchausen syndrome is a serious mental disorder in which a deep need for attention results in the pretense (or even in the artificial manufacturing) of illness. A person with Munchausen syndrome may invent symptoms, push for high-risk operations, or try to rig laboratory test results in order to win sympathy and concern. It is notoriously difficult to treat people afflicted by the syndrome as they go to such great lengths in order to avoid discovery of their deception. It should be noted that Munchausen syndrome is not the same as inventing medical problems for practical benefit (such as getting out of work or winning a lawsuit), nor is it related to hypochondria. Symptoms may include (but are not limited to): dramatic stories about numerous medical problems; frequent hospitalizations; vague or inconsistent symptoms; conditions that get worse for no apparent reason; eagerness to undergo testing or surgery; extensive knowledge of medical terminology and diseases; seeking treatment from many different doctors or hospitals; having few visitors when hospitalized; reluctance to allow health professionals to talk to family or friends; arguing with hospital staff; and recurrent requests for pain relievers or other medications. People with Munchausen syndrome have been known to falsify their medical histories, manipulate medical instruments in order to skew results, tamper with laboratory tests, fake symptoms, injure or sicken themselves in inventive ways, take medications with effects that mimic diseases, and repeatedly interfere with the natural healing process.
Like clockwork, I used to get a painful ear infection right around Christmas. When this happened, my mother would fill the afflicted ear (usually the left) with hydrogen peroxide, then dig around in the bubbling liquid with a bobby pin, searching for pieces of wax. These treatments lasted about half an hour and did nothing to relieve my pain or resolve the infection, which meant that eventually my parents would take me to the doctor, who would prescribe antibiotics, and, god, how I loved those antibiotics. The sweet, spreading relief of them.
Sophomore year of high school I had an especially bad earache, but because we were so tight on money, I didn’t go to the doctor for a long time. Instead, I received many bobby pin treatments, one after another, several days in a row. At a certain point the pain took me somewhere else—inside myself but far away—and I stopped talking.
When we finally did go to the doctor, I saw someone new—a man who must have been covering for my regular pediatrician. In the examination room the doctor told me that my eardrum had been perforated but not completely torn. It would heal eventually. He explained that sometimes these things happened when an infection goes on for too long—the pressure builds, and the eardrum bursts. He said I’d have some trouble hearing for a while, but he could give me pills that would at least stop the pain. Then he asked why it had taken us so long to come in. My mother explained, in the half-joking tone she often used when complaining about me to other adults, that I was a bit of a whiner and that this made it hard for her to know when I was really in pain or when I was just being a baby. She also mentioned that she had been working on the situation with her hydrogen peroxide–bobby pin method. And as she spoke, I noticed that she faltered. I also noticed something on the doctor’s face and on his assistant’s face too, which made me wonder if my mother hadn’t been wrong about the bobby pins and about the pain and about my whining. I tried to see her then as the two of them seemed to be seeing her, and for the first time in my life, I caught a glimpse of a nervous, somewhat strange woman.
Once I threw an apple at my father. We were all getting into the car—Tracy, my father, and I—on a Sunday morning, about to drive to the bakery. It was midwinter and very cold outside, ice everywhere. I was eating an apple—a green one. My father didn’t do anything to prompt my action, just got into the car. But he was slow and fat, and I think that might have been what upset me. I don’t know why, it just made me so mad. I threw the apple—hard—and it got stuck in the puffy folds of his down coat. Without saying a word, he examined the fruit where it had landed in the soft ridges of his sleeve, plucked it out, and dropped it onto the icy driveway before shutting the door, starting the engine, and pulling away. We drove to the bakery then, as we always did—with the radio on low. And once we got there, we bought the usual things: a pecan ring, a loaf of rye bread, a loaf of sourdough, a half-dozen cupcakes.
Spurred by the awkward encounter with my classmate Liz, my mother spent more money redecorating my bedroom than she did on any other part of the house. Whenever she showed someone my room, she was careful to point out the various design features, such as the two subtly different wallpapers and how they tied in with the carpet or the frilly lace pillowcases she’d sewn herself and the exorbitantly expensive drapes she’d had made. A symphony of blues and greens and creams, crowded with faux antique furniture and two twin beds topped by two handmade lace coverlets and masses of pillows that had to be carefully “carelessly” arranged every morning, my room was devoid of anything even tenuously connected to my own ideas of beauty or comfort. Even my telephone was a faux antique, impossible to hold.
Just down the hall, Tracy’s room seemed to exist on another plane entirely. “That’s Tracy’s room,” my mother would say when giving family and friends the grand tour. Often she didn’t even open the door.
The wallpaper in Tracy’s room was the same stuff that had come with the house: a beige plasticky corduroy. There were posters taped to her walls, and she had a sprawling stereo system, which I wasn’t allowed to have in my own room because black, bulky machinery would have clashed with everything else. Tracy’s room smelled like Cheetos and spilled chocolate milkshakes and broken pens’ leaking ink and my sister’s sleepy body. It felt private, and I liked it a thousand times better than my own room, which is why, whenever she stayed over at a friend’s house, my sister let me sleep in her room. That’s where I was the night my mother accused me of being with a boy. She banged open the door to Tracy’s room and stood there, wearing a long white night gown and making crazy eyes. Her hair was a wreck around her face and for the first time in my life, I thought, “She’s insane.”
“All right!” she shouted. “Where is he?”
“Where’s who?”
“I heard you in here, the bedsprings, where is he?” She stomped over to the closet and looked inside it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You’re crazy.”
We fought then, about whether or not she was crazy. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you check under the bed?”
She cocked her head. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” Then she marched over to the bed, dropped to her knees, and lifted the dust ruffle. When she didn’t find anyone there, she said: “I don’t know how you did it, Kimberli, but you’d better be careful. I’ll catch you next time.”
As she was leaving, I said, “You’re nuts,” but so softly she didn’t catch it.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“It had better be.”
After she was gone, I waited for my heart to stop hammering. Then, one centimeter at a time, I rearranged my limbs on my sister’s soft, lumpy mattress. It took forever, but finally, with my arms crossed over my chest and my legs stretched out straight, I willed myself back to sleep.
The street is shiny with snowmelt, the power line hanging over my father’s head encrusted with ice. Where it hasn’t been shoveled or plowed, the snow stands about three feet deep and is dingy near the road.
Although he’s in his midthirties, overweight, and bundled in a puffy blue parka, there’s a boyish jauntiness to the way he negotiates the slush on our front walk as he makes his way from the front door to the car in the driveway. This sense of jauntiness is probably on account of his neck, which is exposed and seems thin and therefore vulnerable and therefore young. Or maybe it’s on account of the way he’s high-stepping it, holding both arms slightly out to his sides, grasping one glove in each hand, carefully picking a path through the icy gray mousse in his big black boots.
*
If I were a playwright, I’d write plays with interesting special effects. For instance, if I were to write a play about a household in which generalized group depression constituted, as it did in my home when I was growing up, the usual atmosphere, I would have the characters slug around on their knees, not walking upright. And I would have them speak through some kind of kazoo-like device so that their voices were distorted and difficult to understand but also sadly comical. I would include directions for clouds to float across the stage while the characters spoke in more or less unintelligible tones to one another, and these clouds of strange colors—colors indicating some kind of disease or pollution: brown, acid pink, greenish yellow—would float above and between them. Sometimes the characters would flop down, no matter where they were—on the kitchen counter perhaps or under a table, on the front stoop of the house, or at a schoolroom desk, maybe even over the shoulder of a disinterested boss—they would just flop down (as I so often flopped down on my bed) and lie there with their eyes open, staring, clearly at something, but exactly what would be unknown, even to them. Every character in this depressed household, if I were to write such a play, would also own an exceptionally heavy pair of boots—large, black, extremely bulky, and difficult to lace up. And every morning each one of these characters would spend a long time getting themselves into these boots as well as some additional time inserting the kazoo-like distortion devices into their own mouths. Yes, if I were a playwright, I would include stage directions like these. But I am not a playwright. I am a glossator.