In the Drink (7 page)

I hit the rewind button and fell onto my bed, where I stared
up at the blank ceiling and waited for the room to stop spinning. Tears pooled coldly in my ears. In the street below, traffic roared through the rain, rattling the white plaster membrane of my little room. The air held me wetly in its mucilaginous grip; I felt as singular, thin-skinned and swollen with humors as a yolk. A long time later I wriggled out of my jeans and threw them on the floor, then turned out the light and lay in the darkness for a long time, not quite awake, but not sleeping, either.

Shortly after I’d left Evandale, Arizona, for Swarthmore, my mother called me at my dorm and announced that she would be moving East the following year. This gave me the impression that she was following me, so I urged her to stay where she was.

“I am so tired of this place,” she said.

“Then why did you stay there all these years?”

“Because of you, liebchen.”

“Me?”

“Because I wanted you to grow up in such a beautiful place, and not have to make new friends in your formative years.”

I snorted. “Ma,” I said, “I didn’t have any friends in my formative years. I couldn’t wait to leave.”

She laughed. “You loved Arizona! You had the childhood I would have wanted, at least I could give you that.”

I thought it prudent not to contradict her.

Although she had lived in upstate New York now for years, I still pictured my mother in Evandale in that spic-and-span cuckoo clock of a house on its miniature, crew-cut, unnaturally green lawn surrounded by a white fence, near the edge of town, on a wide, quiet street that ended where the foothills began their rise to the mountains that ringed the northeastern end of
the valley. On the other side of our backyard fence spread a rubbled waste of fissured sand, lizards, barrel cacti as humped and bewhiskered as old men, saguaros raising hairy arms at each other.

That barren expanse was called the Ventana Valley. Several parched, dispirited little towns adhered to its surface; Candlewick, the largest of these, offered in the way of culture an A&W, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Babbitt’s Supermarket and the drive-in movie theater. Evandale lay a mile or so off the highway, an abject little backwater with a prisonlike elementary school, a couple of small mold-smelling markets, several churches, mostly Baptist, and a brown, listless park. The Ventana Valley was, for travelers passing through, a tedium of empty miles to be crossed. For those of us who were stuck there and wished we weren’t, it was a far deeper tedium of time.

My mother had designed her house with a spatial economy having nothing to do with the desert it sat in and everything to do with the crammed-together medieval Black Forest village where she had been born and raised: it rose neatly, narrowly from the sprawling flats of ranch houses with carports, a slender structure of gingerbread eaves, bay window, dormers, a pitched roof. Every house in town had low plaster ceilings, linoleum and shag rugs, except for ours. Exposed dark beams vaulted our high living room ceiling; our wooden floors and counters were waxed and buffed to an old-world glow. Along two walls of my mother’s study, dusted twice a month, were the complete works of Freud, nearly every existing book about him, the writings of Jung and Adler for purposes of (unfavorable) comparison, and various other reference materials. She kept all her “light” reading on her bedroom bookshelves upstairs—sixty or more dog-eared Agatha Christie paperbacks and a collection of hardbound nineteenth-century Russian novels as thick as loaves of bread. Most of our neighbors owned several Bibles,
subscribed to the
Reader’s Digest
and kept a few brand-new paperback best-sellers on their coffee tables, which they donated to the church bazaar when they were finished with them. In such a climate, the prevailing attitude toward my mother was a mixture of suspicion and admiration. She was an egghead and a brain in a place where gleaning actual knowledge from books was accorded an odd kind of half-wishful skepticism: no one understood it, they didn’t quite believe it could really be done, and so they both respected and derided anyone who seemed to know how.

At the age of twenty-three, Gerda Steiner had left Freiburg to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia, and had become an American citizen several years later. I could see her, dressed in one of those enormous, belted, pleated, shin-length fifties skirts, tapping ferociously at her typewriter until nearly dawn in her tiny rented room up near Harlem, having the time of her life. If Freudian theory was the flame of truth, then she was the glass lantern that housed it, shining over a sea of darkness and illuminating its depths with oral compulsions, dreams about wigs and cigars, Oedipal complexes, repressed urges and desires.

She had loved westerns as a child; she’d sat in German movie theaters, sometimes through three showings of the same movie, staring awestruck at tumbleweeds and sagebrush and sand. All she knew of the American Southwest was what she’d seen in black and white on the enormous screen, but it was enough to instill in her a longing so powerful that she left civilization behind for the wilds of Arizona as soon as she received her doctorate. She founded her mission in the wilderness, the Ventana Valley Psychoanalytic Institute, in a dusty Quonset hut on a scrubby patch of land just off the highway near Camp Ventana. Whether or not she was disappointed by the realities of Arizona after the cinematic dream of her childhood, she got right down to business. She recruited students by
advertising, made something of a name for herself on the lecture circuit, and published articles, no doubt highly opinionated and provocative, in Freudian journals. Her mentor from Columbia and lifelong admirer, Dr. Grover Highland, recommended her program to everyone he could. No one had ever been to Arizona in those days; it sounded as exotic and remote as Persia to suburbanites and city dwellers.

So, against all odds, my mother had managed to inspire an increasing number of people to leave families and jobs for a stint in the middle of nowhere with her. After three years, she’d hired several more instructors and moved to the former site of the Yavapai Country Club in Candlewick, a sparkling, stucco oasis where sprinklers threw arcs of diamonds over the old golf course. Practicing and would-be psychoanalysts flocked from all over the country to be psychoanalyzed and lectured on such topics as “Development and Resolution of the Narcissistic Transference,” and “Eros Against Thanatos: An Analysis of Psychoanalysis,” and even “What Women Want.” Remembering this, I had to laugh to myself. What Women Want! All she wanted were her worshipful students, her tidy little house and stout walking shoes and pork-butt sandwiches every day at noon on the dot! What other woman in the universe wanted those things? How could my mother presume to speak for womankind? But she did, and they all listened, took notes, quoted her later in their own papers.

By the time she was thirty-six, she was the owner of the only gingerbread house in Evandale, the guru of her own institute and the unwed mother of a baby girl she’d christened Claudia after some maiden aunt of hers she’d always admired. My birth was the one part of all this that may not have been on her original agenda, but she set about mothering with the same single-minded efficiency she brought to everything. She changed my diapers and administered bottles of formula
(breast-feeding was all well and good for ordinary mothers, but she herself was far too busy) between sessions and classes; whenever she needed a baby-sitter, she cast a net into her well-stocked pool of serious bearded men or earnest bright-eyed women, one of whom obligingly dangled a rattle in my airspace all afternoon for minimal pay, or maybe no pay at all; the honor of being chosen was no doubt more than adequate recompense.

I had no father, no brothers or sisters. My male parent had been a visiting lecturer named Charles Kirby who got sucked into my mother’s orbit for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom; during their encounter, he had managed to produce a spermatozoon intrepid enough to penetrate the tough hide of her ovum. When she was done with him, she spat him out and he crawled away to perish, or so I imagined my conception as having gone. All she would ever tell me about him was that he was British, male and dead; he’d been hit by a car crossing a busy London street before I was even born. One day I came across a blurred picture of him in a 1967 course catalogue, the year he’d lectured at the institute. I was mystified by his gleaming blond handsomeness: why had he felt the need to consort with the likes of my mother? Although pictures from that era showed a younger, slimmer, smiling version of her, I found it nearly impossible to imagine the two of them together. “He was no one so interesting,” she had told me. “He was so typical! Really, he was after only one thing.”

“What thing?” I asked immediately.

Like any devout Freudian, she believed that the subject of sex was repressed at one’s own risk, so she answered me frankly, but with a detached briskness: she was above such animal urges except for the momentary behavioral aberration that had produced me. Her body was simply the necessary housing for her brain. I never saw her naked, and I doubted that she ever
minutely inspected, as I so frequently did my own, her nude reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She spent her life sifting through the muck of other people’s psyches while consigning her own to the realm of things best left alone; the one bodily pleasure she allowed herself was food, which she enjoyed with unapologetic gusto.

As I got older, I became increasingly aware of the vast, unbreachable distance between the mother I had and the mother I couldn’t help wanting. I was never petted or cuddled, except by the occasional baby-sitter-disciple who’d left her own kids at home in L.A. or New Jersey while she pursued her career, and so found in me a temporary stopgap for her maternal longings. Although she must have been aware of various experiments in which lab mice unlicked by their mothers became weak and listless and finally died, my own mother’s attentions toward me were primarily expressed in determining the true meaning of my behavior: Freud had had some fairly strong ideas about childhood, and I was expected to conform to all of them. I did my best to comply, outwardly at least, but it made me feel a little cheap and apprehensive, as if she’d see right through me and call my bluff. When I was seven or so, she caught me admiring one of my bodily creations in the toilet bowl instead of flushing it down right away the way she’d taught me, and she informed me that I was going through a late anal fixation. “Sorry,” I said, looking regretfully at the bowl. “Should I take some medicine?”

She flushed the toilet with a steady hand. “You should not worry at all. You’re perfectly normal in this. You might find that you do it again, and if you do I want you to tell me, all right?”

“All right,” I said.

The next day I forced myself to do it again, although naturally I’d lost my original private interest in the enterprise. I went into her study and reported my behavior with a nervously
insincere half-smile. She took me into the bathroom and inspected the scene, which was just as I’d left it. “Interesting,” she said, well pleased. She flushed away the data without another word and returned to her work. I shrugged to myself and went up to my room, where I sat for a while, doing nothing, feeling vaguely ornery and low.

Equally perturbing to me, but in a more tangible way, was the shining, fussbudgety legion of porcelain figurines arranged on every surface, upstairs and down, according to some mysterious taxonomy handed down through the generations. They were not to be disturbed or touched. My mother dusted them herself. They had been her mother’s, and before that her grandmother’s. My mother was their present custodian, and I would be expected to take over when the time came, but they had no real owner, they were more like household gods; they possessed, in miniature and en masse, a strange kind of power, a morbid Teutonic righteousness: I hated the purse-lipped little shepherdess and her gamboling sheep, the battery of obscenely fat cherubs with legs like marbled hams, a farm’s worth of creepy cows and goats with mournful human faces, several groomless brides, smugly replete with bridehood, an army of pastoral lads and lasses wielding either buckets, hoes and rakes or fifes, horns and drums, all of them stout and apple-cheeked, deranged with joyful acceptance of their lot. I had recurring, powerfully enjoyable fantasies about shoving them all into a cardboard box, taking them outside into the desert, digging a deep hole and burying them under a saguaro. But since my mother had made it very clear that touching or moving or accidentally knocking one over was punishable by death, I navigated the narrow hallways like a tightrope walker, and rarely ventured into the living room, where every rickety end table and whatnot was jammed with them.

I had a few friends, but our alliance was merely the expedient
and self-protective banding-together of outsiders: Reuben Grady, who breathed through his mouth and smelled of pee; Linda Flavin, a Jehovah’s Witness who wasn’t allowed to make Halloween decorations or wear gym shorts; Jessica Marshall, fat and smart; Bobby Gordon, fat and goggle-eyed; Billy Snow, the scary little deviant; and me. It never occurred to any of us to hang out together after school. It was enough to have to be associated with each other all day.

The only one of my fellow outcasts for whom I felt any affinity was Billy. His father, Ed Snow, was head administrator of the institute; he and my mother weren’t exactly friends, because my mother had no friends, but they liked each other well enough to sit at a poker table together once every month or two, so Billy and I shared the nebulous bond of kids whose parents are associated in some way: we didn’t know whether or not we liked each other, but when we passed each other in the halls or on the playground, we exchanged an awkward smile, as if we shared a guilty secret.

Although Ed Snow had a master’s degree in administration from the University of Texas and an office job working for a bunch of psychoanalysts, he looked and acted like a character from
Deliverance
. He was a swaybacked, chubby, potbellied man with a white-blond buzz cut, a wide, soft face with small blue eyes set crookedly on either side of a pug nose. When he played poker at our house, his eerie high-pitched cackle disturbed the air currents and made my skin crawl. His wife had died when Billy was three, but no doubt Billy looked like her; Ed Snow was a rodent of some kind, a large soft sewer rat, while Billy was a mongrel, feral but intelligent, fine-featured and lanky, with coarse black badly cut hair and thick glasses taped together in one corner.