Riding Fury Home (7 page)

 

 

SOMETIMES GRANDMA stayed with us overnight. She slept upstairs in my parents' bedroom, which Mom had vacated. I worried that she would hear Mom at night, but Grandma was a sound sleeper. I could creep downstairs and haul Mom back to bed without Grandma ever knowing.

The first overnight, after breakfast, Grandma announced we were going to do the laundry. “Go get your sheets,” she told me.

“I don't have any,” I told her, smiling.

“What?” she asked.

I told Grandma proudly my ingenious method of bedmaking. On top of my bed, there was an orange corduroy bedspread, looking prim and neat. There were no sheets underneath it. Instead, I slept on top of the orange spread with the comforter over me that I pulled out of the closet just before going to sleep. In the morning, I threw the comforter in a wad back in my closet. My plan meant that I never had to make the bed and no sheets had to be washed.

“Let's go see,” Grandma said. Her tight face made my chest clench up.

Upstairs, Grandma had me drag the comforter from the closet and drape it across the bed. As we stared at it together, I suddenly saw how frayed it had become, and a bit blackened. It had been a present from Grandma, and had once been a glowing gold satin, soft as a lamb's nose. My grandmother's horror struck a chord of shame in me, as if she had discovered the secret chaos under the exterior of things—
We're not normal, me and Mom
. And it reinforced my unspoken rule:
Don't bring anyone home, don't let them see Mom.
Suddenly, I saw that I was patching things together, and I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

That morning, Grandma taught me how to make a bed
properly
. She demonstrated how to put a pillowcase on and how to make
hospital corners with the top sheet, tucking it just so. But that night, after Grandma went home, I left the sheets on the bed, covered by the bedspread, and resumed my old method. To sleep, I needed that comforter right against my skin.

 

 

ONE TIME, GRANDMA stayed with us over a whole weekend. When Grandpa came to pick her up on Sunday, Grandma and I were standing on the red concrete landing outside our front door while Grandpa put her bags in the trunk. Mom was somewhere in the house. I watched Grandpa open the passenger door for Grandma. He revved the engine and I raised my hand to wave goodbye. As their car started up the driveway, something broke loose in me, and I found myself running after their car, screaming, “STOP! COME BACK! STOP!”

Grandpa braked and I ran to Grandma's door. She opened it and looked at me, squinting, her forehead creased. “What is it?”

“Don't go-o-o!” I was crying.

Grandma sounded tired as she said, “Isidor, get my things from the trunk.” She got out and patted me on the shoulder. “Don't worry; I'll stay with you.”

And for a few days, she did.

 

 

EVERY FEW WEEKS, when I reached into our postal box in the Biddle's musty porch that served as the Millstone post office, my hand pulled out a blue envelope with foreign stamps and PAR AVION printed in the lower left corner.
Dad!
My body fluttering, I raced home along the slate sidewalk and in the front door, yelling, “Mom! Mom! A letter from Dad!” I ignored her unsmiling face, her lack of excitement as
she took the letter and slowly unfolded it, laying it open on our dining table, where we both leaned over, reading it to ourselves.

Dad's familiar handwriting looping across the blue paper brought an ache to my chest, but his writing was dry and matter-of-fact: He told about his fellow scientists at the research project, his visits to museums, plays, and concerts in London. I tried to picture him at these British haunts, but the images were blurry. We couldn't call him, because he had no phone in his rooming house, and even if he did, international calls cost too much.

Mom and I wrote him back, sharing the aerogram, the thinnest of blue paper that folded into its self-made envelope. I wrote Dad about my science fair project making natural dyes using grapes, walnut bark, and goldenrod pollen; about how I had caught a little sunfish from our dock, watched the beautiful iridescent fish swim in our bathtub, and then brought him back in my pail to his home in the river. But there was one thing I
never
wrote about: how hard things were with Mom. Somehow, I'd gotten that my father didn't want to hear the truth. My job was to protect him from Mom, and Mom from everyone.

 

 

RELIGIOUS STUDENTS FROM Zarephath, a nearby evangelical Christian community with its own college, sometimes volunteered to spend time during the day with Mom. They believed in good deeds. The teachers knew my mother from her days studying Latin at their school. The volunteers always left before I got home. Once, I found a remnant from a visit. On the piano, someone had left the sheet music to “Jesus Loves Me.”

Apparently that day's volunteer had played Christian hymns for Mom with missionary zeal and encouraged her to sing along.

“Mom, you didn't sing this, did you?”

She just shrugged.

Rage flooded me. It wasn't right—just because Mom needed help, those Christians thought they could push their beliefs on her. It seemed so unfair to put pressure on a vulnerable person. We were beggars and couldn't be choosers, and the awareness of our dependency enraged me more.

NOT LONG AFTER MY BEST friends Kim and Sharon left for California, I started spending a lot more time with Barbie.

I didn't like Barbie that much, but I was desperate for a friend. As it turned out, our friendship was easy. Barbie had a physical prowess that surpassed mine, and a fearless streak that pushed me in our adventures. She had a small, compact body, a perky, upturned nose, and nonstop energy. We became adventurers together: building forts in the woods, riding our bikes for miles through the neighboring dairyland. She nimbly crossed logs suspended over streams, and I followed, my quaking legs inching along, my arms out for balance, as she waited for me to catch up. In the summer, I leapt screaming from her family's rope hung from a tree on the riverbank into the Millstone River.

On rainy days, we played board games and cards: Clue, Monopoly, Go Fish. On Halloween, she thought up pranks that I joined: We sat in a tree and dropped water balloons on kids in their Halloween costumes, stifling our giggles as they screamed; we ran a dummy
made of old clothes stuffed with newspaper up the post office flagpole. In the fall, we raked leaf mazes and played tag in our creations with her sister and brother, and took turns jumping in a huge pile of leaves. In the winter, we skated on the local pond, racing at each other, joining hands, and spinning in a circle.

The year my father was gone, I tried to never have Barbie over. If she and I had to get something from my house, I would race in and out as fast as possible. I prayed that Mom would be secluded in the back room, out of sight.

At Barbie's, I surrendered to child's play, completely absorbed in Kick the Can or Monopoly, my body tingling from running or my attention focused on the roll of the dice and moving my plastic token. But somewhere in me lived my other life, held in a breathless tension of what couldn't be said: how every night I put my mother to bed, how I fought her to stub out her cigarette, how I hovered all night half-awake, listening for her to fall on her way to the bathroom. My secret, hidden life.

Every now and then, right in the midst of the hardest play—say when I was It, racing after Barbie or her little sister Cheryl Ann—my other self would creep up on me and take me by the throat. Breathless, I'd stop in my tracks, halted by an inexpressible anxiety. “Gotta go,” I'd say to a puzzled Barbie.

I'd take off running and wouldn't stop until I'd torn into the house, yelling, “Mom, Mom are you okay?” and she answered me.

I WOKE TO THE SOUND OF knocking coming from somewhere below me. I stumbled out of bed and down the stairs, shivering and flicking on lights as I went. The knocking became pounding, not at the front of the house, but at the back. My heart raced as I neared the door.

I turned on the outside light and looked through the glass of the French door. The light made the snow gleam a cold blue. I opened the door. Our next-door neighbor, Mr. Jansen, was holding my mother, who stood swaying and shivering in her dripping pajamas.

Mr. Jansen was saying something, but at first it was as if a roaring filled my ears. All I could hear was the
creak, creak
of the black walnut trees that lined the path to the river, their tall thin trunks swaying in the winter wind. Then his words finally reached me. “ . . . and I found her down at the river; guess she jumped in,” he said simply. He was a tall, thin man, and my mother seemed very little huddling hunched and sodden under his arm. He said nothing more, holding her out with his long arms as if offering a gift,
launching her toward me. My arms were stiff like two bowling pins as I caught her there inside the doorway, the frigid winter air swirling around us.

I stared at Mr. Jansen. Words formed inside me, filled me. I wanted to ask,
What should I do?

But Mr. Jansen was backing away. His eyes would not meet mine. My mind was scrambling to think:
Could I ask him to help me put her to bed or give her a bath?
But he was a man; he should not see my mother naked. Silence crackled between us. As he walked away, I would not cry out,
Help!

 

 

INSIDE ME THERE WAS just a cold sensation of tightness, as if all of my muscles had drawn inward, as if my breath were a tiny moth beating its wings in my chest.
Just do whatever has to be done.

I managed to get my mother upstairs, hauling her with one of her arms over my shoulder, my other arm around her waist. I'd decided to run a warm bath. I dumped her on the toilet and struggled with her to remove the soaked pajamas. Her lips were blue, her teeth chattering nonstop. I didn't know if the hot water would shock her, so I made the bath mildly warm. Pressing her hand on my shoulder, she dipped her foot in, then screamed slurrily, “Isss bloody burning hot!”

I added more cold water. She finally plunked in, her body smacking the bottom of the tub as I lost my grip on her. I gradually added more and more warm water, as she could stand it, until it was a regular hot bath. After she seemed warmed enough, I leaned over and grabbed her under the armpits, helping her steady herself as she lurched out of the tub. I toweled her dry, helped her get on other pajamas, and put her in bed. She lay there, teeth still chattering. I got in next to her and lay spooned against her, willing her my warmth.

 

 

THERE IS A PHRASE I clearly remember telling myself in my childhood, repeating it like a mantra, a vow, a motto: “ I am so strong, I can get through anything.” I had no idea of the cost of such survival, the suppressed longings, the anxiety that became like a second skin. The alternative, to not cope,
to possibly let my mother die,
was too terrifying.

If there was rage, in the moment of crisis it was pushed so far down that I couldn't even feel its simmer. It wasn't until adulthood that the immensity of the desertion occurred to me. My mother had left me, a ten-year-old, alone in a house in the middle of the night in the middle of the winter and jumped into the icy Millstone River. She left no note, not even the barest goodbye. Did my mother even think of me as she plunged herself into a cold death, or was her despair so great it overshadowed all other thoughts?

I SAT, NOT MOVING, in the big overstuffed chair in the silent house. It felt like time had stopped, but the sky was darkening, the shadows of the open curtains deepened across the living room. There was a sound of the front door opening, and a woman's voice called, “Karen . . . ? Hello . . . ? Are you there . . . ?” I recognized that voice: Mrs. Fredrickson, Barbie's Mom.

I sat mutely as seconds ticked. The whole sequence of the afternoon flashed through me.

I had walked in our front door after school, as usual calling out, “Hi Mom! I'm home!” Dead silence. I called again. Nothing. I found Mom in the living room, lying on the couch on her side, her arms dangling off the edge. Something was wrong; she had never been a napper. I shook her. Her arms flopped heavily; her eyes fluttered open briefly. Drugged, watery eyes. I shook her shoulder harder, “Mom, how many pills did you take? How many?”

She slurred the words. “Doooon . . . don't let them take me. Not again!” Her eyelids closed.

I moved the coffee table up against the couch and stacked pillows on it, in case Mom started to roll. Then I ran. Out our front door, up our driveway, next door to Mrs. Summers. She opened the front door, and I sputtered, “Mom on couch . . . sleeping pills . . . don't know how many . . . ” She put her arms around me, pulled me into the hall. She patted my back as I kept talking.

Then, from across the river, the town siren began to wail.
Who could have called? Who could already know what happened to Mom?
I tore myself from Mrs. Summers, ran out her door, and back down our driveway. The front door was ajar.

In the dim hall, I encountered our other neighbor: small, blond Mrs. Jansen. Her sad eyes met mine. “I came by to see your mother, Karen, and found her on the couch. I've called the ambulance.”

The crunching of wheels on the driveway gravel, the slamming of doors. Two men carrying a stretcher. I followed them as they carried my mother out the front door. I stepped outside. The light was very bright. Townspeople had gathered in the driveway and all over the front yard. No one spoke, but their eyes pierced me. My mother was loaded in the ambulance, and the red light on its roof started flashing.