V

Vanishing Point

A Suburban Street Somewhere in New Jersey, circa 1979

On a sidewalk bordered by velvety tracts of grass, a sidewalk that dwindles to a classic vanishing point, my mother stands towering over the camera. Whoever took this shot must have been crouching or else a child. The silhouettes of several trees splay down either side of the street. The quality of light in this Polaroid is bright and slightly pinkish. My mother holds her hand up to one side of her face. A bleached circle, one of those airborne sunspots, hovers in the upper-right corner. The fabric of her pants seems to luminesce—her legs look like two columns of marble glowing from within. Other than this, her form is indicated only by the bent angle of her arm, a glowing pouf of hair on one side of her head, the thin black band of her wristwatch. It must be a matter of habit, of knowing her features as well as I do, that I see her face here; in reality there’s nothing but shadow.

Veggie Burgers

She claimed there was a rapist on the first floor of the halfway house she lived in after she was released from the state hospital. But upstairs, in the women’s apartment, she got along pretty well with both of her roommates. I guess they didn’t care too much about the little pieces of paper she taped all over the walls, near the sinks and light switches. One of these, affixed to the bathroom wall next to the jerry-rigged paper towel dispenser fashioned out of a bent clothes hanger (my mother’s invention), read: “You MUST wash your hands BEFORE and AFTER touching ANYTHING else in the bathroom and dry them with a PAPER towel. This means AS SOON AS YOU COME IN AND AFTER YOU USE THE TOILET AND RIGHT BEFORE YOU LEAVE!!! (Plus use a fresh paper towel to turn off the light and open the door.)” There were many such pieces of paper scattered throughout the apartment, all giving detailed instructions about how to use things like the refrigerator, the microwave, and the oven while keeping them germ free, as well as many reminders scrawled on Post-its regarding the importance of flicking light switches on and off using your elbow, not your hand.

After she’d been living there for a few weeks, my mother invited us over for lunch. Isaac wasn’t yet born, but I was extremely pregnant, and I remember that it was hard to get up the stairs because she’d stacked a small armory of cleaning supplies on them: boxes of extra-tall cans of Comet and Mr. Bubbles, multiple jugs of bleach and ammonia, industrial-size refills of Formula 409, Windex, and a job lot of that all-natural supposedly good-for-the-environment cleaning fluid they make from orange peel. The whole place smelled like manufactured orange zest.

Eventually, she’d move into her own apartment (see *hens’ teeth), but not before getting into an intractable argument with the landlord of the halfway house, who leased his property to DMH. The argument concerned several serious health code violations as well as criminal abuses taking place on the property, but in the beginning she seemed like a happy camper. It was a nice old Victorian, in decent shape, in a bedroom community about a half-hour from downtown Boston. Her room was large and sunny, with two oval bay windows. She’d asked for a fresh coat of paint and had received it: the walls were plum red, the trim creamy white. Scattered all over the floor near her bed were dozens of course catalogs and magazines about landscaping and gardening. We spent most of our visit that day outside, on the rounded porch structure off the kitchen. She had made a beautiful container garden out there (though some of the support systems she’d used to attach the heavy window boxes to the railings seemed a bit cavalier).

For lunch we ate frozen veggie burgers zapped in the microwave and a batch of tabouli that she’d made from scratch. The burgers were mushy, but the tabouli was delicious, and I remember feeling hopeful for a moment because it seemed like she was intent on making a fresh start. For example, she kept talking about how she wanted to go to graduate school to get a degree in landscape architecture. But over dessert I think she got confused because as she cut four pieces of frozen tiramisu out of a box, she told Isabella that she’d already been to Harvard and already had her degree, that she was, in fact, already working as a landscape architect and for this reason was “just like Daddy,” only he was an architect of buildings and she was an architect of plants. Actually, the way she put it was that she was “on par” with David, because both of them were extremely lucky to have such hard but interesting work.