She told my sister it wasn’t right, the way they’d treated me when my brother died. She told my sister that she’d never wanted to have her.
Dr K. called me yesterday from Boston. He told me that a large part of my mother’s brain had disintegrated. He said you could see it in the CAT scan. His tone was pleased assurance. He sounded like a mechanic when he tells you, “Yep, the transmission’s shot. Gonna have to replace it.” But there is no possibility of a rebuilt brain for my mother. This is it.
I told him about the lady who lived in the house before my parents bought it. I told him about the lady who lived next door. They both went crazy. I could hear in this two lines of thought: 1. a statistic, odd but probably coincidental, and 2. a story about a world in which women went crazy as easily as autumn leaves falling off a tree.
Betty C. saw piano wires coming out of the bedroom walls. When we moved into that house there was a baby grand in the basement, smashed into pieces. That was strange and so was the kitchen: strips of wallpaper hung from the ceiling, grease splotches covered the rest. The wallpaper print was one of those fifties’ stylistic conventions in which teapots floated next to atomic gyroscopes.
The first time I walked into that house I saw the devil’s face staring at me from the fireplace. Charcoal smudges formed the face of a dark, evil-looking man. I took it as an omen. I was right.
I told Dr. K. that my mother was a big woman. No doubt my father would need help to lift her. Lift her onto the toilet, things like that.
Dr. K. was very nice. He said, “It’s terrible, terrible.” He said that, I didn’t. I didn’t tell him that my father had once tried to strangle me, or that my sister and I had hid in our bedroom closet with our hands over our ears so we wouldn’t hear my mother’s screams. Nor did I tell him how she sat at the table and giggled when my father slapped me.
Instead, I said, soon she’ll be catatonic, won’t she?
Yes, he said, “Oh, yes.”
The colloquial medical name for my mother’s disease, the name med students would use, is “walnut brain”. I found this out by going over to the college library and looking up medical dictionaries. In one book I found before and after pictures of a brain decayed. The after picture looked like a coffee-shop menu photo of cole-slaw. Dried-up coleslaw. But I guess you could see the walnut allusion, too — the the shriveled up husk of someone’s soul, the meat brittle and tasteless.
My sister keeps asking me, where is our mother? The same question my sister’s had since she was three. That, of course, is the question that we always wondered. Where is she? But now my sister means, is my mother trapped somewhere inside, no longer able to express herself, but still feeling? Confused, miserable, buried alive?
No, says Dr. K. She doesn’t have a clue.
My sister went to visit my mother — to say good-bye. She said my mother sat on the living-room couch with her feet drawn up beneath her, her chin resting on her knees. She gnawed on the edge of a pillow, which she peered over, her eyes glittering in the shadows.
Or, as my sister said, she looked like one of those dried-apple dolls with beaded eyes sold in New England gift shops. A little old granny doll that purely expresses the cliché, “Mom and apple pie”.
My mother was able to recognize my sister. This was a relief, because the week before she had been unable to recognize her own younger brother. She told my sister it wasn’t right, the way they’d treated me when my brother died. She told my sister that she’d never wanted to have her.
My sister’s baby came running in to the living room at that moment, screaming and throwing herself into my sister’s lap.
“What’s wrong with that child! What’s wrong with that child!” shrieked my mother.
Later I asked my sister what her other kids were doing. They were upstairs watching the Disney Channel, she tells me.
Were there any other messages from Ma?
No. Some pocket in her brain, some reservoir had stored this little pool of clarity just in time for my sister to glimpse and then it was gone.
Jung said. what is knowledge without understanding?
I don’t think my mother ever believed in her own individuality. Like a good Catholic she repressed every dark thought, every hostile intent, every desire because the sin was in being conscious of these urges, and she most desperately did not want to sin.
Like one of Mary Gordon’s characters says, being Irish means you like the idea of a thing better than the thing itself. And it’s probably also true that the Irish fear ideas more than reality as well.
Sometimes, especially in the morning when I’ve just gotten up, I find myself standing and staring in front of my clothes, with an overwhelming longing to simply be. If I have somewhere to go or something that must get done I shake off this feeling, turn from it as one turns from forbidden fruit.
There are twelve other people in Massachusetts like my mother, twelve other zombies, according to Dr. K. Yet, the disease is inherited. Another unlucky gene that gets passed on at random to the children and grandchildren?
I went down to ASU a couple of days ago to inquire about the Master’s degree in English as a Second Language. The head of the section has one and a half arms, the half arm ending just below the elbow. This arm flapped about alarmingly whenever he sought to emphasize a point.
“Well you’ll be lucky to make 19,000 a year,” he laughed. I watched his wayward limb swoosh through the air to the tune of 19,000.
Like one of Mary Gordon’s characters says, being Irish means you like the idea of a thing better than the thing itself. And it’s probably also true that the Irish fear ideas more than reality as well.
What happens to the children of parents who romanticize the possibilities and encourage the children to seek out dreams? Very quickly the children learn that they, too, are nothing more than dreams. If the children end up smashed on the rocks below or dangling over a fiery pit, the parents turn from the scene, unwilling to be disillusioned by flesh-and-blood.
I look at my grandmother who has spent sixty years spinning out fantasies about what might be and never once stepping out into the howling wind herself.
My parents had fantasies in turn, that they would give my sister and me a leg up, put us through good schools, but that got boring and expensive. They were so convincing, too, that we believed them up to the moment they threw us to the ground like toys they tired of playing with. The damage was done.
They encouraged, insisted on is more like it, total dependency in us girls, then kicked us out into the big world, then said, “Oh, is that the best you can do?”
They liked the idea of visiting me in California one time too many. I think now I abandoned them at their hotel, took off with Peter and Miles to a hotel of our own, because it was essential that I pull the plug on their movie.
I went down to ASU a couple of days ago to inquire about the Master’s degree in English As a Second Language. The head of the section has one and a half arms, the half arm ending just below the elbow. This arm flapped about alarmingly whenever he sought to emphasize a point.
“Well you’ll be lucky to make 19,000 a year,” he laughed. I watched his wayward limb swoosh through the air to the tune of 19,000.
Like one of Mary Gordon’s characters says, being Irish means you like the idea of a thing better than the thing itself. And it’s probably also true that the Irish fear ideas more than reality as well.
What happens to the children of parents who romanticize the possibilities and encourage the children to seek out dreams? Very quickly the children learn that they, too, are nothing more than dreams. If the children end up smashed on the rocks below or dangling over a fiery pit, the parents turn from the scene, unwilling to be disillusioned by flesh-and-blood.
I look at my grandmother who has spent sixty years spinning out fantasies about what might be and never once stepping out into the howling wind herself.
My parents had fantasies in turn, that they would give my sister and me a leg up, put us through good schools, but that got boring and expensive. They were so convincing, too, that we believed them up to the moment they threw us to the ground like toys they tired of playing with. The damage was done.
They encouraged, insisted on is more like it, total dependency in us girls, then kicked us out into the big world, then said, “Oh, is that the best you can do?”
They liked the idea of visiting me in California one time too many. I think now I abandoned them at their hotel, took off with Peter and Miles to a hotel of our own, because it was essential that I pull the plug on their movie.
Which left me with the question, what about my own inventions?
Well, better mine than theirs. I wanted to script my own damn movie.
It’s good to have dreams of a better life, but how to effect them, make them real?
It’s clear to me, as it has been to millions of other women, that we’ll all be better off if I work. But work at what? Settle for being “just” a teacher? Or put my nose to the books and study the math and logic they use as the gateway to decent pay?
And what of my paintings? Can I continue to do them and work and maintain a home? Which of those am I willing to give up?
The paintings won’t guarantee a better life for my family, but at least I’d leave something behind of myself.
The paintings are concrete expressions of my own dreams and fantasies. They’re something I have a genuine talent for.
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