Such a Pretty Face (35 page)

“What should we do?” I heard them asking, again and again, their hands clasped together. “What should we do?”

Save a baby granddaughter at the expense of their daughter, when their daughter might well die in such a place? Endanger the granddaughter by leaving the daughter at home? And what about Stevie, they kept discussing. What’s the impact on our “darling Stevie”? The impact now, the long-term impact. Do we have Helen leave so the granddaughters’ mental health is saved? Can we counteract the negatives that Helen heaps on them by wrapping them up with love and kindness? Are we making a terrible, terrible mistake that will have awful repercussions we can’t even see?

These, folks, are not the conversations anyone ever wants to have.

Eventually they told themselves they could keep the baby safe because they could not get their minds around committing Helen to hell again, and they decided to double their efforts to keep Helen from Sunshine, her Trash Heap.

I don’t blame them for their decision. Even now, even after the bridge incident. They could not have possibly conceived of what was going to happen.

But they blamed themselves every single day afterward.

I loved Sunshine and spent all my time after school and on weekends with her. I pushed her stroller, I rocked her to sleep, I read her stories. As she grew older I taught her how to play with stuffed animals and how to kick a soccer ball. Grandpa or Grandma would take us to family parties in town, and all my cousins hugged her. We worked with Grandma in the garden and we played in the stream.

“I love you, Sunshine,” I’d tell her.

“Love you, Evie.” She couldn’t say Stevie, so that’s what I got. “Love you, Evie.”

I taught her what the animals were and their names.

“Bob the Horse,” I’d say.

“Aw da Hor,” she’d say.

“Sheba the sheep,” I’d say, pointing.

“Eba da eep,” she’d say.

“Horny is Grandpa’s dog,” I’d say.

“Porny pa’s da,” she’d say.

I taught her songs, too, and I was teaching her the alphabet and numbers.

We continued with art time together.

Grandma was a talented artist. She could draw anything—the Schoolhouse House, the barn, the town, our wildflowers that sprung up every summer—but she always put a fairy-tale spin on it. She hid a gnome behind a flower, a leprechaun on a leaf, a magician casting a spell on a frog. Watching Grandma work was like watching a storybook come to life.

This is what Grandma told me about art: “Make it your own, Stevie…. Let the art tell people who you are, what your moodis, what you think of life, the world…. Your art can be serious or funny, or both. It can tell the truth or poke fun. It can be sad, or it can offer joy. Make sure your art is true to you, Stevie,
it must be true to you.
”

One afternoon, on a four-by-four-foot canvas, Helen painted a cliff. It was black, gray, jagged, dangerous—even the grass blades were sharp and dangerous. Around it were thick, looming, curving trees, resembling the bars of a jail cell, a dark shadow looming between the tree trunks.

At the very bottom of the rock was an arm. No body, only an arm and a hand. A left hand, I noted.

She named the painting “Night Night.”

Then she glared across the table at Sunshine, who was two years old, and whispered, “Night night.”

A few months after that, Helen’s behavior escalated. At dinner one night, the rain drumming against our windows, she decided she didn’t want her left hand.

She was eating toast and raspberry jelly because it was red, Kool-Aid because that was red, and an apple, also red, when she suddenly slammed her left hand on the table and said, “Who put that there?” She held up her hand and studied it, teeth bared.

We explained that was her hand, but that didn’t work. “I don’t like it. It’s a spy tool, isn’t it?” She shook her hand. “I want that off.” She slammed her hand back down, three times, then picked it up, keeping it limp. From then on, she carried her left hand limply, halfway up, swaying back and forth.

In an abrupt change of subject, which I was so used to, she glared at me and said, “I don’t have a daughter. I don’t want a daughter. I want a shoypertobarn,” she told us.

“Helen, that’s enough,” Grandpa snapped.

“Helen, do not say things like that, sweetie,” Grandma said, angry. “I forbid it.”

“Fuck you, sweetie,” Helen said, gently, sweetly, reaching out to grab my grandma’s hand with her right one. “Sweetie, fuck you.”

I swallowed hard and then coughed. I tried to clear my throat, but I couldn’t do it. I started crying at the table, the tears streaming out of my eyes. Helen had said mean things so often, but this one stuck. I cried because I was so worn down from the constancy of Helen’s delusions, illusions, shouting at voices, strange reactions, hitting, and her hatred of my sister, my best friend. And I cried because I could feel something black and sinister lurking over all of our shoulders.
I could feel it.

Grandma grabbed my hand, then said, her eyes furious, “Helen, leave this table right this minute.”

And Grandpa said, his voice raised, “Out, Helen, now. Right now! You will not hurt Stevie!”

But Helen didn’t move, even though Grandpa yanked out her red chair from the table and grabbed her under the shoulders to haul her out.

“There’s water coming out of your eyes,” Helen told me, astonished, peering straight at me.

“I know that.” I hastily wiped the tears away.

“Why is there water coming out of your eyes?” Helen asked.

“Because I’m sad. Don’t you get that? Don’t you get sad?” My voice raised, a rush of emotions flowing right out, a waterfall of pain.

She looked confused, then suspicious. “Why are you sad?”

What to say? I’m sad because you’re my momma and I don’t have a normal mother and maybe it would have been better if I had no mother, as I have no father? I’m sad because I’m so tired? I’m sad because you hate my sister?

“I’m sad because you make me cry a lot.”

Helen didn’t say anything, but her eyebrows rose and her mouth opened a little bit. She reached a hand out to me. “I’m sorry I make you cry, girl kid. I’m sorry.”

I was too shocked to say anything.

And I could see her then, in a flash, the mother I wanted to love. I could see a little bit of sanity in the backs of her eyes.

“I don’t want to make you cry.” She let go of my hand and slapped her cheek, one, then the other, quite hard, then held the heels of her hands to her eyes and arched her neck. “I’m just a Helen,” she whispered. “I don’t know. I don’t understand. All the voices. It’s so noisy in my head. They’re telling me what to do. I’m scared. I’m scared all the time, and I’m wet and I’m gooey and I don’t want to be in a can. Do you think my friend Tonya is in a can? And I don’t like your chairs and this thing”—she waved her limp left hand—“and it’s a bad thing in me. I’m bad. Bad Helen. I am a bad girl, and I made that girl kid cry.” She conked her head on the table. “He’s going to kill me. He will. I will be dead.”

I felt my breath catch and that familiar feeling of sickness overwhelmed me. Through the tangle of my harsh emotions, I often felt overwhelming pity for Helen. How would it be to be her? To listen to that cacophony in her head twenty-four/seven? She was living in hell. Absolute, white-hot, nightmarish hell.

Why can’t the voices that schizophrenics hear be kind and gentle? Why couldn’t they praise my momma, encourage her, tell her to hug her daughter and bake cookies? Where did those vicious, violent voices come from? Why?

She whipped up her head and wiped the tears off my cheeks, so gentle, so sweet. “You’re a good cuddly animal.” She cupped her hands around my face, and for a sweet second I let myself believe that Helen was the same as all my girlfriends’ mothers, kind and nice, the type who made cookies and wore blue dresses with heels, who smiled and helped out at school.

“I like you,” she told me, her eyes slipping back into nowhere again. “But not her.” She glared at Sunshine, who was clutching a stuffed tiger. “I don’t like that one. She’s a chair. She has tentacles. Trash Heap has worms. I think she eats them. Kerboomalot.”

Shortly thereafter, Helen kidnapped Trash Heap and hid her on the cliff near the trees that looked like the bars of a jail cell.

Ashville, Oregon

H
elen continued to hold out her left hand in a weird way and told us it didn’t belong to her. “Get this off. It isn’t mine.”

I said, “Okay, Helen, I’ll take it off for you finally, but I have to find a hand screwdriver.”

Do you see how I had to buy into her insanity at times, how I had to talk to her, manage her?

“A hand screwdriver?” she asked. She tilted her head. She was wearing a kids’ red cowboy hat.

“Yeah. Grandpa has one, but it’s a special one to get rid of hands and he’s not home, so I can’t get it.” I pushed back my hair, and the charm bracelet that Sunshine gave me clinked.

“You’ll get the hand screwdriver later?”

“Sure, I will.”

We sat down and did our artwork. I drew a picture of a miniature fairy village. Sunshine painted with her fingers. Helen drew a picture of a black bridge with a turbulent, dark sky and a moon with a reddish-orangish haze. Under the bridge, in the cresting waves, she drew two left arms and two red dots. I knew the red dots were eyes.

On Monday Helen felt bugs running up and down her body and scratched herself so bad she bled.

On Tuesday she tried to climb up on the roof of our barn to jump. Grandpa scrambled up behind her and caught her in the nick of time. I saw the whole thing. He could have died trying to rescue his daughter.

On Wednesday morning she said, “I will kill myself before I let Command Center get me.” She was eating blueberries in a row, one by one. The row stretched across the table. Every time she ate a blueberry, she ate a bite of peanut butter. She stopped abruptly and put her hands in her lap. “I’ll take you away from Command Center.”

“Thanks, Momma,” I said. I wished Helen had slept in. I could get off to school without talking to her, and then I wouldn’t have her voice and all the other voices she was fighting with in my head. It helped me get 100 percent on my spelling and math tests if she wasn’t around when I was eating my cereal.

“He’s coming for us. So I’ll save you.”

“Good.”

She put the salt and pepper shakers up to her ears and listened to them. “Nothing there.” Then she dumped a load of sugar into her bowl and listened to that. “Only one voice.” She picked up her spoon and clinked it on the glass. “I can hear the voices, but they’re quiet today.”

“That’s good,” I told her.

Her head snapped up. “I’ll take you with me, girl kid, away from Command Center, but not Trash Heap. I won’t take her.” She took an eyeliner and small mirror out of her pocket and drew an eye on her forehead in brown. “Now I can keep a better eye on that small thing.”

I shuddered. Sick and scared.

On Thursday she smashed the TV because she was being watched.

On Friday she tried to beat up a cow.

On Saturday afternoon, in town, she whacked seventy-five-year-old Mr. Shiminsky with a spatula because he had “coughed,” and that was a signal that it was he who had tried to take her kidneys last night in her bedroom.

That afternoon I ate three cupcakes and tried to calm the nervousness that stalked the better part of my childhood on the farm.

I knew something bad was going to happen.

Two weeks later, on a sunny, serene Saturday morning, Helen tried to cut off her hand with a piece of glass.

I was curled up in bed next to Sunshine, who had crawled into bed with me, as usual. She smelled of lemon-scented shampoo and soap. The light was flowing through my window, highlighting the dust fairies dancing around. The Schoolhouse House was quiet, the birds chirping. I remember those birds. Later I would always associate the early morning chirping of birds with fountains of blood.

I woke up to the sound of shattering glass. Helen had broken her window with a hammer. I got up carefully, not waking up Sunshine, and ran for my door. I heard Grandma and Grandpa pounding down the hall at the same time that Helen started hollering, “Get out of me, Punk! Get out of me! I know you’re spying on me!”

It is not normal for children to see their mothers covered with blood. These images stay with you, burned and red and jagged, pricking at your innocence like a butcher knife against skin.

But there was Helen, a spurt of blood greeting my eyes. She was on the bed wearing a queen’s outfit that she’d worn onstage on Broadway. She even had a crown on over her dirty hair.

She held up her wrist as blood spilled out. “Hey, kid. It’s coming off. It’s not mine. The short spy, Trash Heap, put it there, I think.”

Then she passed out onto her bed, the blood seeping into the mattress.

I dropped to the floor as Grandma and Grandpa flew in. The last thing I remember is Grandpa picking Helen up and running out the door, blood flying everywhere.

Weeks later, when Helen drew an eye on her forehead and on her chin, because the government was spying on her and she wanted to “spy back,” I took Sunshine upstairs to our bedroom to play with the dollhouse Grandpa had made us. She sat in my lap. At first she wouldn’t play with any of the little dolls. I did it all. I walked the plastic girls around, put them at a table, had them take a nap. She watched me, her shoulders down, her body hunched in on itself, her unhappiness palpable.

“I love my charm bracelet, Sunshine, that you gave me, and I love you.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You’re pretty. Your hair is gold and sunshiney and yellow.” I pushed one of her curls back. I had put her hair in a little ponytail with a pink ribbon that day. “You’re the prettiest three-year-old in the world.”

She leaned her back against my stomach, and I gave her a hug.

“What’s wrong, Sunshine?”

She turned around and rested her cheek against my chest. I put the mother from the dollhouse back at the kitchen table.

“What’s wrong, Sunshine?”

She hugged me close, her tears flowing into my shirt.

“Why are you crying?”

She didn’t answer.

“Sunshine, what’s wrong?”

She said a few words, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

“What? What did you say?”

She lifted her head, her big blue eyes drowning with tears. “Momma hate me. Punk hate me, too. She told me. And Command Center hate me, too. Why everyone hate me?”

I was stunned. It felt like my heart had been hit with a nail gun. “Sunshine, Momma has a sickness in her head. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She doesn’t understand. She says bad things, but she’s not bad. She does love you, but she’s messed up….”

Sunshine wasn’t buying it. “She hate me. She say I going night night soon. Good-bye. Command Center take me, that what Momma say. Night night.”

I hugged her close and rocked her back and forth.

She picked up the momma doll and threw her across the room.

Grandma overheard that conversation. I knew because I heard the stairs creak, and then I peeked out my window and saw Grandma running to her garden. When she got to the middle of it, she leaned her head way back, hands over her face, and cried, eventually sinking to her knees near the lettuce.

Grandma and Grandpa were up against a wall and the wall was bending, curving, squeezing them. Our family was going to be suffocated by that wall if it didn’t smash the life out of us first.

After many discussions that I eavesdropped on, and many tears, they took their last option: electroshock therapy.

Helen was going to be tied down to a hospital bed and electrical currents were going to be shot through her brain.

Not generally something one wants to do on a Thursday afternoon.

When we got Helen back from being electroshocked, she did not appear to recognize any of us for days.

I don’t think she even knew where she was. She’d been gone for three weeks. Grandpa flew her to Seattle to a very expensive place for the mentally ill whose families have lots of money.

Grandpa gently helped her out of the car. Grandma went right up to hug her. Helen pulled back, hands up. “Don’t touch me,” she whispered. “Not now. No touching.”

Grandma backed off and brought her right into the house, fussing over her.

I said, “Hello, Momma.”

She tilted her head, quizzically. “Yes. Hello, girl kid.”

Then she studied Sunshine, who said, “Hi, Momma,” in a quiet, little voice, her lower lip trembling.

“What is that?” Momma asked, pointing at Sunshine. “What is that? Is she wearing a worm? I think she’s trying to kill me.”

The electroshock therapy and yet another round of new drugs did nothing for Helen except flatten her out for a bit. Grandma had to mix the drugs in with her food because she refused to take “tiny spy pills,” so who knew if she was getting the right amount of drugs with her strange or nonexistent eating habits.

For the first few weeks it was like watching a zombie who had a penchant for ball gowns and chicken wire.

Helen didn’t protest as much. She didn’t shout to her voices, although sometimes I saw her lips moving, a whisper coming out now and then, her made-up words slurring with the real ones, as if she’d forgotten those, too.

She did remember one word, which she whispered to Sunshine often: Night night.

Night night.

About three months after she had her brain electrocuted, Helen started seeing Command Center taunting her.

The first time it happened, we were eating dinner. It was Chinese food, I remember that. I had opened up a fortune cookie, and it said, “Accept your blessings.”

That night she let Grandma shower her. Grandma had gotten into the shower with her bathing suit and Helen smelled nice afterward. She’d even sniffed her hair. “I smell lemon,” she told me several times. She put on a blue flowered dress, a red velvet cape, her boots with the chicken wire, and a tin foil necklace.

Helen looked up from her fortune cookie and released a bloodcurdling screech.

It about gave Grandma a heart attack. Her wine spilled all over her lap, and Grandpa jumped straight up, ready to protect his ladies.

Sunshine moaned in fear, scrambled off her chair, and hid behind me. I couldn’t move I was so scared.

Helen climbed on the table, her face twisted with rage, and yelled, “Shut up, Command Center.”

I hugged Sunshine close to me, her skinny body trembling.

“Get back in the hole. You’re not taking me with you, gosh dammit!”

She picked up a dish and threw it at the corner. “Get out of here. No one wants you around.”

She picked up another dish and threw it.

I told Sunshine to run upstairs to our room, and she did.

Grandpa and Grandma tried to reason with their daughter, but she wasn’t listening to their pleas, their entreaties to calm down, relax.

She rearranged her foil necklace, then raged, her fists clenched, “Oh, no, not you, too, Punk, not you! Get out of here.”

“Momma, it’s okay. Nothing’s there. No one’s there—”

“Oh, you don’t know that, you don’t know that at all. He’s invisible to stupid people, but I see him.”

I felt my stomach clench with hurt.
Stupid
. I was stupid.

“Punk, I can see you,” she hissed, ignoring Grandpa’s hand as he gently tried to get her off the table. “You’re hiding behind that couch right there. I see you spying on me. I can see your red eyes! I can see your green nails. Get rid of him, Command Center, or we’re done. Put your cloak over him! I’m telling you right now!” She arched back, her hands out like claws. “Damn shit. You’re a damn shit.”

Grandma tried to calm Helen, but it wasn’t working. Grandpa said, “Sweetie, come on down. I’ll take care of them.” Nothing.

Then Grandma held herself up to her full height, stood in front of Helen, and said, “Command Center, leave. Punk, out of the house, right now!”

“Yeah, get outta here!” Helen yelled, her thumb in the air pointing toward the door, as she swayed back and forth on the table. “They’re still here, I can see them. Command Center is behind the lamp, and Punk is under the couch. I can see his red eyes!”

Grandma ran around the lamp, punching her fists, peered under the couch, and said, “Punk, get out of here!”

“I am not a slut!” Helen argued. “No, I’m not! Quit shouting at me! Make the others shut up! I said, I’m not a slut! You can’t torture me with your knives!”

Grandpa said, in a threatening, mean voice I’d never heard before, “Punk, I’m going to get my gun. Now get the hell out before I shoot you.” Grandpa went to a wall, grabbed one of his grandfather’s unloaded guns, and aimed it at the couch.

Then Grandma said, “If you don’t leave, Command Center and Punk, I will cast my spell! Do you hear me? I will cast my spell.”

“Yeah, she’s gonna cast her spell,” Helen yelled, punching the air with her closed fists. “You’ll be turned to dust!”

I watched, confused, bewildered, scared. Before my eyes, Grandma and Grandpa seemed to be morphing into Helen.

Grandpa ran forward and pretended he was shooting Punk and Command Center. Grandma waved her hands around while she was casting her spell, and Helen declared, “It’s three against two. It’s three against two!”

Now, why did that work? Was Helen exhausted because she’d been up all night? Maybe. Was it the medication, perhaps, recalibrating something in her mind? Were her demons suddenly, for a reason we’ll never get, mentally scared off? Was it Grandma praying not for total healing but simply for peace this one night that did it? Who knew?

But it worked. It absolutely worked.

Helen abruptly froze, then bent to stare at the lamp, climbed off the table, and peered under the couch. She blinked a couple of times and fiddled with her necklace “They’re gone,” she whispered, in awe. “They’re gone. They’re away.” Grandma and Grandpa each put an arm around her and laid her on the couch. “Finally, they’re gone.”

Grandma pulled two blankets up to her chin, and Grandpa stroked her hair. Helen closed her eyes and Grandma got her a fruit drink, mashed up her medicine, and had her drink it. “I’m not a slut, and I’ll bet the damn fried shits will come back to kill us on the cliff,” she said sleepily. They would, we knew they would—they always did—but Helen went right to sleep.