My father always says, “It’s a fine line between madness and genius,” but really, how thin can the line be, given that the guy’s built his home right on top of it with a lovely view of crazy on one side, sane on the other?
Wall-to-wall brilliance, though.
My mother has a different catchphrase: “Common sense is more important than genius.” She should know the value of the former, having survived thirty-three years of marriage to someone who didn’t have an ounce of it in his entire body. He’d leave plates of half-eaten food on the floor and then wonder why ants were invading his office. He couldn’t remember where his kids went to school or when our birthdays were. The one time my mother sent him to pick up some groceries (a tale she often repeats), he returned with nothing from the list she had given him, just a box of Twinkies, a bag of apples, and a bottle of wine. He had lost the list, he told her, and was “forced to improvise.” Since she needed diapers and formula for my older sister Hopkins, who was an infant at the time, Mom was forced to return to the grocery store herself—strapping the baby into the car to take with her, because a man who didn’t have the common sense to call home and ask what was on the list definitely didn’t have the common sense necessary to watch a baby by himself.
Mom’s no slouch in the brains department herself: she graduated from Harvard, too, and went on to get an MA there, which would have been a PhD if the professor she’d met at a faculty tea who whisked her right off to New York for a romantic weekend hadn’t soon after asked her to marry him. Which she did, dazzled by his reputation, his distinguished-looking gray hair, his gallantly archaic way of speaking and holding doors for her, and of course, his blinding intellect. I doubt she was even thinking about (and certainly wasn’t using) common sense when she let him sweep her off her feet, or about how a twenty-year age gap might play out over time. But once the babies started coming, common sense’s stock probably rose quite a bit.
Mom’s brilliant in her own way and crazy enough in her own way, too. Not in Dad’s way, of course—no, Mom sees things clearly. Pessimism and cynicism run so deep in her that she often uses fiction for a few minutes’ respite from a reality that can get too dark. Most of my childhood was spent standing around waiting for her to look up from a book. “Just let me finish this chapter” was the refrain on the soundtrack of my childhood.
But she can’t ignore the real world completely, and a couple of times a year she succumbs to a deep, dark depression that snatches her up in the middle of whatever she’s doing and drops her down into her unmade bed in her darkened room for several days, where she hides and ignores anyone who dares to enter. It used to terrify me when I was little, but eventually I learned that while those days themselves were miserable—as we were left to the mercy of our very distant father or, in our early years, to the overwhelmingly stifling hugs of our maternal grandmother, who couldn’t remember our names but embraced us all with indiscriminate enthusiasm—they passed with no permanent damage to any of us. My mother would eventually emerge from her bed and her room, be a little vague and uncertain for a day or two, then gradually return to herself: short-tempered, dictatorial, mercurial, and—admittedly—a little slovenly.
Recent pharmaceutical advances have helped. Her depressions are less frequent and much shorter now than when we were little.
Anyway, it’s no surprise that my older sister’s a world-renowned neurologist, no surprise that my brother’s an agoraphobe—genius and madness are as much a part of my family’s genetic pool as the straight brown hair and hazel eyes that my parents and siblings all share.
Me? My hair is curly and red, and my eyes are blue. Go ask Gregor Mendel how that happened.
* * *
I was fourteen when Mom decided enough was enough and told my father their marriage was over, a conversation that she reported to me and my siblings with no acknowledgment that we might not find the news as delightful as she did.
I waited anxiously for my father to pack up and leave.
No one except me seemed to notice that he didn’t.
Admittedly, Dad kept a low profile after that, roaming the hallways late at night and making cups of tea at two in the morning but otherwise keeping to the top floor of the house when he wasn’t at work. He created a bunker up there with his books and computer and stacks of papers, sleeping on the old daybed that was supposed to convert the attic into a guest room when needed, but really just made it easier for him to hide from his wife.
And the truth was that after making her big announcement, Mom did seem to go about her daily life for years without taking much notice of him. They lived separate lives in the same house. She dealt with Milton, my younger brother, who still lives at home and doesn’t require too much in the way of daily upkeep—just the occasional snack and a reminder to shower now and then—and continued to do the least amount of work necessary to keep the big old house from falling down.
Maybe Mom needed all those years to get used to the idea of being on her own. When she told my father their marriage was over, she had made something clear to herself—that this man was not the man she would grow old with—and I guess she felt like that knowledge was enough for the moment and action could wait until later.
And now it’s later.