We’ve been home from my grandparents’ farm in Illinois for one month. Three days ago my mother collapsed in the hallway outside her bedroom after returning home from a dinner party with my father. I watched as she was wheeled on a gurney through our apartment on the way to the hospital. Now she’s due home any minute and my brothers and I are playing Battleship on the floor of the playroom, waiting for her. When we hear the back door open, we leave the game and head to the kitchen, where my father is helping her walk. He is holding her by the arm, and she is taking slow, small steps down the hall. She is always thin, but now she looks bony in an old-lady way. Knobby shoulders poke through her thin sweater, and her hands—big for a woman, she has always been proud of that—look even bigger in comparison to the rest of her. Her pants hang.
“Are you still sick, Mom?” Jay asks quietly, looking up at her back as we follow.
“I’m much better, sweetie pies,” my mother says, looking only partway over her shoulder.
My father and mother enter the bedroom and we file in after, the four of us standing together, arms hanging at our sides, as my father pulls the covers back and my mother sits on the bed, then lies back on the pillows and pulls the covers up over her legs. She is moving slowly, like she will break if she isn’t careful.
“What’s wrong with you?” Greg asks.
“Your mother is fine,” my father snaps. “She just needs a little rest.”
“I had an allergic reaction to an aspirin,” my mother says. “I’m happy to be home.”
* * *
We’re home from school. I have been in charge of taking my brothers the eight bus stops back and forth from Seventy-second Street to school at Walden on Eighty-eighth. I drop my book bag onto the kitchen table, then head back to my mother’s room, where she lies, wearing her thin white nightgown, propped up with her sheet pulled and tucked just below her rib cage. After my day out in the world, she seems extra fragile and weak.
“When are you going to get up?” I ask. I have three Chips Ahoy! cookies in a napkin and I’m eating the fourth.
“When I get my strength back.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“I don’t know, Christine,” she says.
After dinner, I am in my bedroom. My father’s voice raises from down the long hall. Instantly I go cold. His voice is urgent, high, and whiny, but he’s not yelling yet.
“Four weeks? It’s been four weeks, Carol.”
There’s a pause as my mother replies, though I can’t hear what she’s saying. Then comes the murmur of his response, too low for me to make out, too. This is unusual. Things usually escalate. He is clearly making an effort to tone down whatever frustration he is feeling. I’m guessing that, faced with the bedridden, porcelain-delicate version of his once-robust wife, he is at a loss. We are in a new landscape. My mother is not okay, as she has always reassured me. The bad guys didn’t get her; something invisible has. The too-big city with its unknowable outer reaches is not outside our apartment; it’s somehow inside now.
* * *
“The books are multiplying, Carol.” My father picks up the small stack from the side of the bed. Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, Let’s Get Well, Food Is Your Best Medicine. He holds them over his head like he’s going to throw them.
“You think these crackpots know what the doctors who have gone to the best schools in the world and spent their lives on the cutting edge of medical and scientific knowledge don’t?” My father’s favorite book as a boy was Microbe Hunters, about the discovery of penicillin.
I’m standing just outside their room. I was heading in to see my mother but stopped when I heard my father’s voice. I can see in through the crack in the door.
“Doctors don’t know about nutrition. Adele Davis makes the correlation between diet and health, Edgar.” My mother speaks slowly and evenly and calmly pats the sheets down that cover her hips and stomach.
“There’s nothing wrong with you that a trip somewhere wouldn’t fix.” His intonation lifts at the end in a slight plea. “This craziness doesn’t have to take over the house.”
He hands her the books. She takes them and he turns and walks out of the room, passes me without acknowledging me.
* * *
My mother has just returned from a doctor’s appointment and is climbing back into bed. She slips under the sheets, tucks her feet in, then slides down, her arms behind her, arranging the pillow against the ten-foot Louis XIV headboard.
“Stupid doctors,” she says.
”What did the doctor say?” I ask.
“He said there’s nothing wrong with me.”
My heart leaps. This is the news I’ve been waiting for. But as she pulls the sheets up around her neck, I feel a familiar sinking feeling in my stomach. She’s not going anywhere.
“What did you tell him was wrong?”
“I told him my symptoms. Doctors only know what they know. They don’t know how to think beyond their limited understanding of health.”
A week later I return home from school to find her spooning wheat germ from a jar on her bedside table into a glass of orange juice on the tray in her lap.
“I had four babies in four years. When I asked the doctor what I should eat to fortify myself before having you children, he said I didn’t need to take anything special. Nothing! I used to eat entire boxes of Lorna Doones when I was pregnant with Bradford. No wonder he has the issues he has. I can’t get mad at myself; I didn’t know any better.”
The tiny square brown flakes swirl and spin. I’ve never heard of wheat germ before. I know my mother had never heard of it either before she read about it in her Let’s Get Well book sometime in the last few weeks. It’s late afternoon. She’s just returned from a doctor down the block—walking distance from the Dakota—who has been giving her B12 injections, something I’ve also never heard of.
She finishes stirring. “When they make white bread, this is the part that’s taken out to refine it. Anytime you refine something, you’re taking out the vitamins. The healthiest part of the wheat is the germ. Do you want to try it?”
“Plain?”
“You can mix it in some orange juice if you want.”
“That’s okay.”
I take the dry spoonful she hands me, put the whole thing in my mouth. It’s a large dry mass on my tongue and I feel myself start to gag. Can I get this down? But the saliva starts to come and the mass slowly moistens. I chew. Swallow a portion, continue to chew. It tastes nutty and sweet but also too strong, like something that should be cooked. But overall it’s not terrible. If this is going to be the extent of the fallout from her collapse, B12 injections and wheat germ, things might not be so bad.
* * *
“Your mother’s breakdown isn’t physical,” my father says in a low voice.
We are in the hall, and I am heading back to the kitchen. My mother has asked for her raw egg and orange juice, something else she’s eating these days besides wheat germ. He is going in the other direction, dressed in only an undershirt and boxers, scripts under his arm, clearly heading to the study to read.
I stop. This doesn’t feel like information to just throw at someone and continue on.
“What?”
Is he saying she’s crazy? My brothers are nine, eight, and six. I know suddenly and completely that he’s not going to ever say what he’s saying to me, to them. But ten feels too young to hear this, too. I want to tell him that so much of the information she’s sharing with me makes sense: about low blood sugar; that milk is fit for the calves nature intended it for, not humans; that red food dye causes hyperactivity in children. But standing here, alone in the hall with him, none of that seems right to mention. And of course there’s the question I can’t answer: If these new things she’s reading about are true, why doesn’t anyone else besides the authors of my mother’s books, crackpots as my father calls them, think they’re important?
“Never mind, Christine. Go back to doing whatever you were doing.”
I’m not going to tell him what I’m doing: running to fetch yet another strange concoction for my mother to ingest. I continue toward the kitchen without elaborating. He continues in the other direction.
My mother’s cheeks are flushed when I get home from school a few days later. She’s been in bed for more than two months now. She’s in bed but she’s dressed in street clothes, jeans and a sweater. I have regressed. I miss my mother during the day when I’m at school, not just at night. I feel homesick, the way I felt at camp, even when I’m home.
“Are you going somewhere?”
“I took the train to Boston today to see a new doctor. He treats with food, not medicine. Something he could be put in jail for, practicing medicine without a license. Can you believe that? He’s saving people’s lives, which threatens the powers that be. Dr. Bilotte says he’s never seen a case as desperate as mine. He said he almost didn’t take my case.”
“Why not?”
“He’s afraid I’ll die and he’ll be blamed.”
I’m surprised to see her looking this pleased with news that sounds so dire.
“I haven’t told your father. I’ll tell him when the time is right.”
* * *
The slab of raw beef liver sits dark red and shining on my mother’s plate. She’s sitting up against her pillows in her nightgown.
She holds the slab down with her fork and cuts a slice carefully with her steak knife, brings the slice to her lips. I stand by the side of the bed and watch her chew.
“Does raw liver taste good?’
“It tastes good to me. It’s keeping me alive. I’d be dead without it.”
My mother has told me that Adele Davis writes about desiccated liver powder, how strengthening it is.
“Did Dr. Bilotte tell you to eat raw liver?” I ask hopefully.
“Not specifically. I will share with him how strengthening it is when I see him next.”
She swallows, and cuts another piece. Tendrils of tissue attach to this slice and hang off the fork as she brings all of it to her mouth, slurping up the hanging bits.
“It’s helping me regain my strength. I’m very grateful for it.”
* * *
My mother flips the strange block that sits on our kitchen countertop, then flips it again. It’s covered in waxy paper and wrapped several times around with a string. She finds the ends of the wax paper, which fold together at the ends of the brick in triangle corners like a Christmas present, and peels back the paper like she is unwrapping something precious. But all that’s under the wax paper is a wet-looking gray brick. An unfamiliar smell, sour, like someone’s sweat, wafts into the kitchen. My mother licks her thumb as if tasting a delicacy.
“What is that?” I ask.
She peels back enough of the paper to stab half an inch from the end of the brick with a butter knife and slices in a downward sawing motion.
“Baker’s yeast. I had to buy it from the black market. It’s illegal.” She sounds pleased with herself.
Illegal? Could she be arrested?
“Doctors are nothing but drug pushers. The medical profession wants us all to be tied to taking their drugs.”
The end of the brick peels away, flaking slightly. A clear dairy farm bottle of milk, though the milk inside is gray, not white, sits beside the brick. My mother explains that it’s goat’s milk. I have never heard of anyone drinking goat’s milk. She pours the gray milk into the blender, then plops the gray wedge from the brick in with it and turns it on. The yeast and milk froth into a gray foam. After a moment of blending, she pours the foamy mixture into a glass.
“Do you want to try yeast milk?” she asks.
I pray silently and urgently that this shake’s taste justifies its strangeness. I tip the glass forward. But as the foam brushes my nose, warning bells instantly go off. The sour body-odor smell, mixed with goat, is overpowering, and my face wants out but it’s already too late. Hemmed in on all sides by the glass, I have breathed in a cloud of sour gray droplets. It’s on my skin, up my nose. Some of the foam has touched the tip of my tongue.
I put the glass on the counter and try to wipe the smell out of my nostrils with the back of my arm.
My mother, on the other hand, sips it once, again. Then again. Swallowing and sipping like she is drinking the most delicious milk shake imaginable.
* * *
Bernie, the psychologist my father hired to speak to me a few months ago, sits at the foot of my mother’s bed, still dressed in his reddish-brown tweed jacket that matches his reddish-brown beard. I think of reasons to pass by my parents’ bedroom door, cracked just enough that I can glimpse inside. He raises his hands, presses them together as if in prayer as he speaks, then lays them on his lap. Then he uses them to support himself on either side of his hips, raises himself up slightly, hands flat on the bedspread, then settles back again and lifts one hand to scratch the side of his beard. His voice is low and murmuring. If my mother is responding to him, I can’t hear it.
“Your father thinks I need a psychiatrist,” my mother says to me after he leaves, spitting the word. “No one understands how to treat the body with diet. So stupid. So stupid.”
* * *
My father hires workmen. They come dressed in overalls. They bring ladders and build scaffolding; the sounds of hammering and high-pitched drilling fill the apartment. As they progress, they leave in their wake long rectangular silver boxes and shiny round silver ducts clinging to the ceiling, overhead tunnels that, when they are through, run the length of the apartment and turn out to be an air system. Our eight-foot-tall windows are sealed shut with plumber’s caulk. We are not allowed to break those seals or open any window. Shades are drawn.
“New York City is filled with people all breathing the same air,” my father says. “Look outside. They’re not sick.”
I come home from school to the silence of our apartment, the white noise of the air system, soothing but also a reminder of my mother still lying in her room, down the hall, waiting to be well.
* * *
It’s midnight, and everyone is asleep. My parents have allowed me to set up a cot beside their Louis XIV four-poster bed, itself dwarfed under the fourteen-foot ceilings of our apartment, because my dread of bedtime has turned into a full-blown panic. In my parents’ room, the air is humid and comforting and smells of my father’s shaving cream, the white vinegar my mother uses to rinse her hair with, and the faint ever-present aroma of floor wax. On the cot, I can hear my mother’s breathing. In my own room, I am afraid she will die while I sleep.
The next morning I peer into the oven, standing on a chair so I can reach. The tomato bubbles, its flesh lightening to orange as it cooks; juices run down its sides into the grooves where the skin has split with the heat. The fat on the lamb has browned, and the juices, too, pool and crackle. She’s graduated from eating raw liver to this meal, broiled lamb, broiled tomato, and yeast milk, three times a day, nothing else. It’s been a month.
My mother sits up in bed as I approach, pats the sheet and comforter down to flatten them into a table, spreads the towel she keeps with her for her meals in bed. I set the plate onto the towel, hand her a knife and fork.
“Don’t you get tired of eating the same thing over and over again?” I feel sorry for her, though the lamb and tomato, at least, smell delicious.
”Dr. Bilotte says lamb is the easiest meat to digest. This meal is designed to give my body the most nutrition with the least amount of work involved to digest it. I can feel that this is giving me strength.”
* * *
My mother is feeling stronger and we begin going to Point Lookout again on the weekends. As we leave New York, we pass through the city’s outer rind. I am conscious for the first time how frayed New York City is around the edges: the overpasses tattooed with graffiti, chain-link fences woven with rusting cans, fast-food wrappers, smashed paper cups; the city’s sloughing off dandruff and dead skin. In the car, my brothers sleep, my father reads the paper, my mother drives. No one else seems to notice how litter and loneliness both lurk on the outskirts of things, the places where no one’s paying attention.