Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  So many times, I’d heard my parents admonish or plead with Lucia, reminding her all it takes is one bad batch, that this is life or death. Now, it was death, here to announce itself, to abruptly, irrevocably raise the stakes.

  My father had picked my mother up in the black Nissan minivan he still drove, the family car we affectionately called the “dog-hair chariot,” and my parents were driving from New Jersey to Brooklyn. My mother was afraid Lucia would kill herself in the interim. She’d looked into Anya’s eyes as she and my father left the house, passed her the receiver, and said sternly, Do not hang up this phone until you hear my voice on the other end.

  So you talked to Lucia the whole time? I asked.

  She just cried, Anya said. She was crying so much I couldn’t understand her.

  You’re alone there now? Are you okay?

  Rebecca was sleeping over, she said, but she called her mom and got picked up.

  You didn’t want her to stay? I asked.

  It seemed too weird, like…she trailed off. I don’t know. She would have stayed, I’m sure, but they’re gonna come back with Lu soon and she’s really fucked up.

  Anya’s stoicism was chilling. Or was it numbness? She could have been in shock. She had been shielded from the worst of the family’s problems, maybe she couldn’t have seen this coming. Still, we didn’t know any young people who had died. How could she be home alone, thinking about the fresh cadaver of Lucia’s beloved Lorenzo and not feel terror in her bones? I thought often about that conversation my sisters must have had, a little bubble of screaming trauma, that forty minutes between the two of them, three thousand miles away from me. A sixteen-year-old looking for the words to pack the wound of her big sister’s fresh grief.

  I’ll fly home, I said. I’m coming home. I’ll pack now and I’ll be there as soon as I can. But stay on the phone with me now. I’ll wait with you until they get home.

  No, it’s okay, said Anya, her voice small but resolute. I’m okay. I’ll see you soon, I guess.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  In San Francisco, I sat stupefied in a lukewarm bath, the mint trim of the bathroom looking garish under the thin overhead light. Rachel and Kat sat on the floor just outside the tub and we all just looked at one another. When my parents returned home, they called me, and when we hung up, my father bought a bereavement-fare ticket for me, and called back with the details. The girls drove me to the airport and hugged me fiercely. Call as often as you want, Kat said, squeezing my hands one last time. Call all the time. Rachel held my face and kissed me on the mouth. I love you and you’re brave, she said. In the airport in the early morning hours, everything was moving. The smell of cheap coffee filled the large, open space. I bought a newspaper and tried to do the crossword puzzle. I wrote in my journal about heroin, which had reached out like a claw, grabbed me from clear across the country, called me home. My idyll—the fantasy of remove that California represented—had been seized by it. Before leaving, I called K from a pay phone and told him I didn’t know when, or if, I’d be back.

  chapter five

  At home, it turned out that my parents had lost their minds. Fear and worry and grief had combined to form a temporary insanity that rendered them tender, ultra-present, and completely distracted at the same time. My dad hadn’t moved back in, but he hadn’t not moved back in. I don’t remember where my mother’s boyfriend was—had he been sent away? That wouldn’t surprise me. Ours was the type of family that banished outsiders and closed ranks in the event of emergency. It seemed, for a period of weeks, that we were always all together. The original five. My parents on the phone, accessing their network of doctors, directors of programs and facilities, and others with cultural capital, connections, wisdom to share. Someone knew someone who knew someone. Jews are breathtaking to behold in a crisis. We had a leg up—whiteness, money to borrow, doctors to call—and still, drugs had proven indiscriminate. We operated as though they could take her at any moment.

  In another house, far away, Lorenzo’s family was busy with their own phone calls, except for flowers, a casket, a priest. There was no one left for them to worry over, nobody—no body—to save, and the guilt of this disparity, the narrow, twisted fork of fate by which someone else’s child had been sold the bad batch, also fed my parents’ madness.

  It was April, and the San Francisco flora to which I’d grown accustomed—technicolor California wild roses and poppies, flowering vines in fuchsia, hot orange, and carmine red, crawling up cracked apricot stucco walls—all had been replaced. In New Jersey, everything looked like a Sopranos set and felt like childhood. Cement. Low skies pitching forward, spinning carousel-like. Intermittently, a timid scatter of crocus or daffodils quaintly teasing the dawning spring. There was familiarity in every route and pattern, like wallpaper memorized from a crib. It was there in the grand castle-like houses up on the hill and in the modest box-like ones at the bottom, made of red brick and aluminum siding in a limited array of muted breakfast hues: butter, oatmeal, coffee with cream.

  We ordered takeout and cried. Drove in pairs to Watchung Plaza for twenty-ounce hazelnut coffees we greyed with skim milk, and sesame bagels with cream cheese. CVS on Valley Road for tissues, Tampax, Visine. Then returned to the fold and became again the five of us, in the bunker of our erstwhile family home. Every room had been beautified to my mother’s elevated-rustic specifications, and I skulked around makeup-less in an old T-shirt and pajama bottoms, savoring it. For eight months, I had been living in the damply foreign paradise of Northern California, in an ever-changing climate that sent my internal thermostat spinning, and I still had not adjusted. No diurnal rhythm had been established in the chill of that twinkling elsewhere, a verdant city where Rachel, Kat, and I were totally free and making it on our own, pooling what we could earn and what we could steal from our six jobs.

  Back home, I remembered what it felt like to not have to be responsible for myself. I’d missed this suburban safety. There was a neat stack of clean towels in the linen closet and an endlessly renewing store of string cheese and nonfat yogurt in the fridge. Big brown boxes of sourdough pretzels stood sentinel in the pantry. Even beneath the shroud of grief, everything felt abundant, paid for by someone else. It filled me with shame that I could enjoy the special, locked-down coziness of even tragic extenuating circumstances. Times like these should be the inverse of holidays, but they feel an awful lot like holidays. I liked the forced closeness, the reliable swelling of feeling, hushed planning. Being altered by that sudden lurch into intimacy. I liked being among my people—a kind of “going to the mattresses.” That was an old mafia phrase my mother had taught us as kids. I assumed she got it from The Godfather. It was what the mob bosses did when they were going to war against a rival family, when they needed to be out of sight and be able to keep an eye on one another. They would lie in wait someplace and strategize, ready themselves for action. I liked the extemporary, make-do domesticity evoked by the phrase, a family closeness that arose urgently, that was imbued with sudden purpose. We weren’t going to war, but our clustering together in trauma could feel that way. It could make you feel cupped inside a hand.

  I remembered the time a few years earlier—before she threw the party while my parents were out of town—when Lucia went to see a band in Pennsylvania with friends (and a twelve o’clock curfew) and never came home. I was in eighth grade at the time, Lucia a sophomore in high school. I woke in the morning to find my parents frantic, my mother looking somehow gaunt and haunted after the one lost night of sleep. My father was on the phone with the police. They’d already called hospitals in two states. No information, which could be good or bad. Even the breakfast dishes looked different. I sat at the table and joined in the worrying, telling my mother it was going to be all right. You don’t know that, she said, her brow drawn up like a mime in exaggerated concern. Everything was all right in the sense that Lucia resurfaced. She had spe
nt the night partying in a motel room with some friends, and my parents’ relief that she was not found lying in the proverbial ditch superseded their anger, although I remember she was eventually punished. The feeling in the house that morning was a beginning. Up to that point, we’d been good girls.

  Now my sister was in a catatonia of mourning—hours of quiet and then, from the bathtub, wailing. Spasms of crying during which she heaved and shook with shock, grief, withdrawal, and end-of-an-era panic. She’d seen Lorenzo as her soulmate and salvation: I’ve met my match, she told me, grinning, the first time she showed me his photograph. He looked like a rock ’n’ roll singer, leaning back in a chair with aviator sunglasses on and a faded T-shirt so worn it had small holes around the neck. They’d rushed headlong and hot-blooded into love, partying together, moving in together, and getting engaged all within a little more than a year. That was the way in our family. Now he was gone.

  My mother and father had a frenzied, under-slept look that was unmistakably middle-aged. They took turns sounding sane and insane. In the days following my return home, at the urging of a doctor, they took my sister to a rehab so she could detox and be monitored by professionals. But she was put into a padded cell, or some sort of fiercely surveilled ward for people who posed a danger to themselves, and when she was finally able to call home forty-eight hours later, she cried and begged to get out.

  So they brought my sister home, somewhat defiantly. We would minister to her ourselves, heal her with love, keep her alive. No pressure. I believe that she is suicidal, my mom told me, and until we can get her into a new treatment center, we have to watch her like a hawk. I stayed up at night, writing in my journal as she slept. The living room was bathed in cool moonlight, the asphalt of the street velvet-smooth outside the window. The house smell: a sedentary comfort in its faint moisture. The threat of rain, new paint on old wood, East Coast in spring. The April showers that bring May flowers. I ate the sourdough pretzels. I kept watch. If my sister killed herself, it sure as hell wasn’t going to happen because I got distracted. I was in the same room with her, or else I was peeking in on her or trailing her. I followed her everywhere—a regression to an earlier time, when I’d been the needy little one. Dealing with this version of her was a paradox. When caring for her as part of this triage team my parents had made us into, I felt like the big sister. It took only one withering look from her, one eye roll, and I could still be made small and superfluous, like I was getting in the way, too young to understand. Get out of here! she protested as she sat down to pee, reaching toward the bathroom door to shut me out. I edged my way in anyway and stood by the sink, waiting. Jesus, are you fucking kidding me? she sniped. Can I please have some privacy? I shook my head feebly, trying to stand my ground and offer a partial apology at once. I stayed put as the stream of urine slowed to a tinkling drip, and as she wiped, she groaned with annoyance. Mommy told me to! I said defensively, sounding like I was five, as she breezed past me on the way back to bed. These moments were mildly humiliating. I was a reluctant warden—it didn’t feel like it was in my nature to be a spoilsport, or a rat. I still wanted my sister to love me, to think I was cool. But I also didn’t want her to die. Especially not while I was in the house.

  In the aftermath of Lorenzo’s death, the full weight of Lucia’s sickness laid heavy on the house. Her illness seemed newly unpredictable and now even more evil, and our household turned on the simple idea that she did not know what was best for her. The rest of us knew better how to heal her. My mother led the effort. I was her faithful deputy, just following orders.

  Beneath my compliance, resentment stewed. Flashes of rage toward my parents had been a regular feature of my last few years at home—normal hormonal disturbances, I imagined, to which were added the strains of our situation. I was angry about their divorce, angry that they always seemed focused on either Lucia or themselves. I was especially mad about the thing I couldn’t yet put into words: that I’d been told everything, let in on everything, that I’d been compulsorily enlisted in the parental ranks and was expected to carry out my duties with the equanimity, responsibility, and care of an adult. I was mad that I was so sensitive in the first place, trained in an empathy so granular and heartbreaking and Jewish, that my view on the family was so robust that I couldn’t just be plain angry like a regular teenager. So inclined was I toward empathy and understanding that I didn’t even know how I really felt about anything, whatever that even meant. I saw everything from everyone else’s perspective and I felt bad and sad for us all.

  But I also loved being seen as an adult, and felt defensive of my parents’ choice to treat me like one. I was precocious, after all, and proud of it. When a therapist referred to my parents’ oversharing and overreliance on me as a form of “emotional incest,” I felt physically sick. That phrase is disgusting and I don’t want to use it, I said.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  At home in New Jersey, I noticed new books on the built-in shelf in the living room: Courage to Change and The Language of Letting Go, books of daily meditations on codependency.

  Reading these? I asked my mother.

  I’m trying to educate myself, she said.

  Is it helping? I asked.

  I don’t know how people can let go when their children are in trouble, she said. That’s not ever going to make sense to me.

  I started reading the books, which were full of benedictions, creepily oversimplified descriptions of alcoholic family life, combined with some of the seemingly random material I’d been so alienated by in that first meeting full of grandmothers—weak analogies for struggle and surrender involving a dog or a long walk on a beach. Each entry was followed by a quote from a famous dead writer, movie star, or president. I found the books soothing and irritating in equal measure, but I was at least relieved to see it written that my intermittent rage was normal. “It is important to allow ourselves to feel—to accept—our anger toward family members without casting guilt or shame on ourselves….Help me accept the potent emotions I may feel toward family members,” I read in The Language of Letting Go. “Help me be grateful for the lesson they are teaching me.”

  chapter six

  Both my parents acted like we were on the run from something, but my father’s craziness didn’t hum like my mother’s. His energy has always been steady, his voice deep and reassuring. Rather, it seemed he was seized every once in a while by panic, but even that he expressed in his usual reasonable tone. His panic lived inside the things he said. About a day after my sister returned home from the psych ward, he met me in the kitchen as I poured a glass of lemonade and handed me a white plastic shopping bag from A&P that felt like it was full of long utensils. Bury this in the backyard, he said unceremoniously as I swallowed a warm, tangy sip of juice. I looked up into his eyes, suddenly confused, and terrified by his senselessness. I’m sorry, what? I asked.

  Do something with this, he said, shaking his head. I don’t know—bury it in the backyard. It’s the sharp objects. We’re supposed to get all the sharp objects out of the house.

  Um, okay, I said. I took the bag and felt its contents, which were stretching the thin plastic. Their handles knocked together in my hands. She’s really gonna kill herself with tongs? I asked. He didn’t smile. The look he gave me was resigned. It was either “the doctor said to” or “your mother is making me do it” or “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” It contained the same confusion I felt that we were living in this reality at all—our world, but flipped fully on its head—a place where someone might turn a kitchen knife on themselves. None of it made any sense. I don’t remember what I did with that bag, but I can recall its weight in my hands. What would we cut with now? Or would we all be living like patients, picking halfheartedly through soups and puddings. Did we even own this many knives and pairs of scissors? I could feel the shape of the blades through the plastic, but the parcel felt also full of salad utensils
, ladles. I wondered if the nail clippers had made it in. Or the old wood-handled barbecue fork with which my dad had speared our summer steaks.

  Between the death and the funeral, there was a week. A funeral dress was procured from Macy’s—something black, a widow’s sheath, plucked from a circular rack of synthetic wool blends. Opaque black tights. Pumps. My parents drove into Brooklyn to begin to clean out Lucia and Lorenzo’s apartment, a trip that so disturbed my mother that for the second round, I went in her stead. What had been so terrible? Shit she’d only seen in movies. Needles. Cigarette holes in the mattress. Blood on the wall. A roommate who looked her in the eye and said of my sister, with both menace and sympathy, “She’s in real bad shape.” Like she was a minor character from an episode of Law & Order, just some fucked-up chick who would soon die of an overdose.

  To finish cleaning out the apartment, I went with my dad. I still enjoyed the quiet, upholstered warmth of the front seat of his minivan. I’d spent so many hours in his car, en route to soccer games, school functions, parties, and dates, comforted by the casual strength of his hands, the dry knuckles of his long fingers spread along the steering wheel. My dad knew every road, every vein and artery in the whole state, and he drove confidently, making intermittent conversation while the radio was on, and then turning it off to gently interview me. I’d told him secrets from that front seat, complained about my mother or my boyfriends. I’d cried into my lap, and he’d laid that big, dry hand on my knee. When we were kids, he drove a blue Volkswagen van, which felt big as an airplane, and to the beat of the gender-bending late seventies rock ’n’ roll he loved, with the window rolled down, he tapped his left hand on the driver’s side door, his wedding ring making a rhythmic knocking sound. I always felt safe inside his car, listening to that clunking reminder of my parents’ marriage, which still seemed at that time unquestionable, fixed as the stars in the sky.