by Aimee Bender
3
I don’t know whether there is a lot of documentation on psychotic people and psychic people and if they have any overlap. I’m guessing no. Most people in the grip of psychosis are not usually considered trusted custodians of the future. The man at the bus stop warning us all about the end of the world has been there since its beginning, since there were bus stops to stand by, or their bygone equivalents, like the horse trading station. There he was, by a pile of hay, yelling of brimstone, and no one paid him much mind then either.
But it turned out that my mother was right about the bug. She was several days too early, and mine had not been crawling, but there would end up being a bug in me after all, just a few days after she checked into the hospital, my fated bug, a butterfly I’d found at the babysitter’s apartment, floating like a red and gold leaf so prettily on the top of a tall glass of water. I did not have any other way to hold on to it, and I could not possibly leave it in the babysitter’s apartment, and the only container handy was myself. Time was short. I drank it down because I had to.
4
The night after the locked bedrooms, my mother had knocked on my door in the early morning.
“You can come out,” she said. “I’m better.”
Her voice, back to its consoling musicality, singsongy and light. I ducked my head through the doorway, and she hugged me, and petted my hair, and told me I was a beautiful girl. “There is a bug in me,” I said, and she said no, “no, no. Don’t listen to me. Darling! Don’t. I was in crazy mode. Don’t listen. There is a bug in me.” “Not you,” I said. Her hair was brushed, and smelled of the sweet lemon hair product she used to comb it through. She was wearing her most special bathrobe, a gift from Aunt Minn, the one with the red satin edging and an eruption of ruffles at the neck. We went to the kitchen as per our usual morning routine and ate fried eggs and toast together, and then after I’d filled the pan with soapy water, and dressed and brushed my teeth, she sat with me on the damp cement second-story stoop to wait for Alberta’s mother, who drove me to school because she’d apparently heard rumors about my mother from someone else at the elementary school, and Alberta’s mother decided she did not want to put Alberta in our car for a carpool, so one day she’d volunteered to do it all.
Outside, it was foggy and gray, the promise of a late morning rain, early March on the Willamette.
“Are you going to ask the babysitter?” I asked. The babysitter, Shrina, came over only occasionally, but when she did, she would march into our apartment with a tote bag packed with construction paper and glitter and glue sticks, like some kind of art fairy.
My mother glanced at me. She touched a finger to the edge of her lips, like she was trying to remember something.
“If I should stay with her,” I said.
“You don’t need to stay with anyone else.”
“Are you going to call your doctor?”
“I’m feeling much better today.”
Across the street, a neighbor walked by, tugged by two small white dogs. Below us, the stairway zigzagged down, and toward the bottom, what looked like a silverfish turned off a step to shimmer into a clamor of ferns.
“Aunt Minnie probably already called her,” I said.
“I’ll talk to your aunt later.”
Alberta’s mother drove up in their burgundy car. Alberta was sitting in the back. She pressed a paper doll of an army soldier up against the window. Her father was off in another country, for war purposes.
“Bye,” I told my mother.
She kissed my cheek and told me to have a wonderful day.
“Make it a fun one,” she said. “Will you do that for me?”
I nodded as I headed down the steps. It was just like her to sever her mood from the day like that, as if she had no impact on me.
* * *
—
If I piece together the timing, she shattered her hand with a hammer less than an hour later, because, she told the doctor, she’d been overcome by the notion that there was something crawling inside her bones and she wanted to see it. “Or smash it,” she told the doctor, who told my aunt. “You know. The way you smash a spider.” “But who hits spiders with a hammer?” my aunt whispered to my uncle, in their hallway, after she’d gotten off the phone in the kitchen with the hospital psychiatrist. By then, I had been at their home for about a week. The hallway walls were interposed with tiny framed embroideries of farm animals that she’d found on a cheese trip to Vermont and thought were the sweetest pictures she’d ever seen. They were very sweet. They were also kind of hard to see, they were that small. On occasion, with little else to do, I would drag over a stool to determine if one was a lamb, or a goat. “You’re applying regular logic,” my uncle murmured back. “What makes sense about any of this?” and my aunt shook her head in hard little movements and when I got up the nerve to scoot past them from my outpost in the kitchen, she was leaning heavily on his chest, eyes closed. Where was baby Vicky? In some wheeled hooded contraption bound by a blanket.
With her functional hand, my mother managed to call 911, who sent an ambulance, treated her for shock, then broken bones, and once stable in the hospital, directed her to the psych ward, where they declared her in the midst of another psychotic episode and unfit for parenting. My uncle hopped on the next flight to Portland. My aunt, who had spent the morning calling first the babysitter and then hospitals after getting no answer on the home line, went into labor a couple weeks early, and after my uncle landed, he drove in from the airport, ran up the steps of my school like a man in a movie, folded me into his arms, and then took out a pad of paper and set everything up before flying home to be back as close to the birth of his own daughter as possible. I believe he missed Vicky’s entry into the world but was there for the first feeding. In the front office, he knelt and asked me to come with him that day, to “join us, to be with all of us for this big moment,” but I refused to go because a) it was still brand-new information that I would be leaving town, and b) I didn’t see him/them all that often, and c) I would not take a plane. “I will scream,” I said, by the office’s long wooden waiting bench, surrounded by concerned-looking secretaries, beneath a series of sunset-themed watercolors as produced by one of the other grades. “I will scream, and then I will stop, and then I will scream again.” I said it simply, but I had eyes that could fix on an adult and I knew how to hold a gaze without blinking. His own eyes, fluttering open and closed, looked tired, rimmed with red.
“It’s true,” piped in the head administrator, Mrs. Washington, with her brilliant pink lipstick, pausing at her keyboard. “She has been frightened of planes all year.”
I was eight years old then, and we’d had a transportation unit as part of our curriculum that year, on buses, trains, planes, bikes. I’d been so afraid of the airplane section that the teacher had allowed me to do extra work on locomotion instead, including an interview with this same Mrs. Washington in the front office, whose brother was a conductor on the rail line from Atlanta to D.C. I had assumed at the time, despite reassurance, that a plane flew so fast you could only see blur out the window, and what I needed in those days more than almost anything was to track where I was and where I was going. In this way, I could feel myself and my priorities as very different from those of other children. Mrs. Washington told me all about her brother’s role on the train, his seat in the front, his engineering degree, and all the stops—eighteen—including one in Charlotte, which was the name of one of my classmates, and I wrote up my report and attached an extensive illustration and was done with it.
But the need to track my existence didn’t end there; sometimes, at recess, while other kids slid and swung and hurled themselves joyfully through space, I would stand by myself at the far end of the playground, and hold still to take stock of my physical cutout in the world. It was a way to remind myself of myself, to tap into the world outside: feet on pavement, taste of
cracker, silver fence, breezy air, and it was a very useful activity for me, if alienating to others. I did not, to my luck, catch the eye of the deep bullies, so all I got called was Statue or Lump or teased because Freeze Tag had ended long ago, and a classmate might groan, “Will someone please unfreeze Francie?” while running back to class after the bell rang, and someone might just listen, tapping my shoulder as they passed, and I would use that little link, that beautiful wrong context to pull me back from far inside myself to the group of humanness to which they said I belonged. I usually felt so much better then, following them in, clattering into the classroom, so much surer after taking stock that I could settle in my seat and thank the red cheeks and shining eyes of Luther or Janie or whoever had freed me, and we all laughed at my outer-spaciness even though it had been the pure opposite, that my usual performance of social participation was in fact far more subject to internal drift than the me who stood by herself with eyes closed listening to others play. When my mother, on the phone with her sister, had watched me standing so close to the wall and thought I was talking to it or bonding with it, all I had been doing was a version of the same thing, feeling where my nose made contact with wall, feeling edge of skin meet plaster, and thus finding myself in the difference. My great love then—and still—is delineation. A plane, and possible blur, was out of the question.
“Train,” I said, looking at my uncle right in the eye.
“It will take two days.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t go with you.”
“That is fine. I can take it alone,” and he laughed with soft bitterness and said he’d find me some kind of steward. He thanked the secretaries and led me outside, into the slate-skied afternoon.
By this point, it was just past school lunchtime, and across the street, the local cafés and eateries were filling up with neighborhood adults. We stood by the cement base of the flagpole and watched them for a while as they entered their restaurants, me absorbing his nervous, kindly presence. He smelled of peppermints and sweat. The last time I’d seen my uncle here in Portland was many months earlier, during the Fourth of July holiday weekend, when he and my aunt had flown up to visit and my mother had presented them with four crocheted blankets at the airport of varying shades of red, white, and blue that she’d knitted during a stretch of sleepless nights. I would get a full night’s rest and wake up and the house would have birthed a new blanket. The closet overflowed with them. A few had skipped stitches you could stick an arm through, and I took those to be like visual representations of her speeded-up mind, when she was going so fast she could hardly stay in her chair, which made me crumple inside, thinking of it, but that also (now) I find weirdly touching realizing how hard she was working not to get me up. At the airport, by the baggage claim, when my aunt had widened her eyes like a terrified deer, seeing the giant bag with blanket after blanket emerging, like the bag was vomiting blankets, my mother laughed in a shrill way and grabbed two back right away. “Kidding!” she laughed. “Just kidding! These are for the school blanket drive.” Her eyes flashed, and she wrapped the striped one around herself as if to hold herself together. She had told me once while tucking me in that she did not always know when her behavior was off, which was one of the more horrifying aspects of being sick, she said, that she did not always know what was well, and what was sick, and she had asked me, please, to tell her. “Please.” The colorful bar sign from down the street had turned on and cast a grid of reddish light on her cheek so she looked like a person in a movie, eyes pleading, a lit tear traversing the frames. I patted her hand, and lied, and told her of course I would, no problem. On that airport morning, my aunt’s face had stepped in and done the job for all of us.
At the flagpole, in front of the elementary school, my uncle and I stood together like we had never seen people enter restaurants before, people holding the door for one another, settling into seats to read menus. People sitting at the window, drinking from glasses of water. People talking, and shaking salt onto piles of food behind reflections of cloud movement in the grand picture windows. We stood for over fifteen minutes, and I made no move in any direction. Other than the hard line about not taking the plane, my will was pap. When, earlier in the day, during a lesson on the color wheel, the principal had summoned me out of class to her office to stare at me behind thick black-framed plastic glasses and tell me what had happened, which she hardly understood, and I hardly understood, what I had been able to grasp almost instantly, besides a dull awareness of a surprising amount of blue paperweights in her office, and the flashing red dome light of her industrial phone, was that I would not likely be able to live at home anymore. After all, I had heard the phone conversation the night before. I had been living with her, and just her, for years. The man she’d been seeing was only an occasional kind of beau, who would vanish after this event, never to be seen again. I was surprised, and trembling, and wrecked, and nauseated, but not particularly shocked.
“Can I see her?” I asked my uncle, as we crossed the street and settled into a swirly painted booth at the busy burrito place that smelled strongly of cinnamon horchata. He said no, not for a while.
“She is very sick, Francie.”
“Will her hand heal?”
“Her hand will heal.”
“Will her head heal?”
“Her head will heal, too, but more slowly.”
I thought about that. “Is there a bug in her?” I asked.
My uncle rubbed his face, and then picked up a pastel-colored sugar packet. “No,” he said, wringing the paper until it burst. “Sort of,” he said.
Our food arrived, and he lifted his burrito over a bed of glittering sugar crystals, while I opened mine to find the circle of tortilla containing it, because one might not remember that the lumpy burrito bundle had been built from such a shape.
“She was able to make me eggs this morning,” I said as we wandered back to the school, and he nodded, hands deep in his pockets. “She put the eggshells in the trash. She took out the trash last week and put it in the bin.”
“That’s good,” he said, bobbing his head, obviously elsewhere. “That bodes well for her recovery.” He looked at his phone for the nth time and called my aunt, who proclaimed, so loud I could hear it, that she was seven centimeters. “She says she loves you,” he told me, hanging up, even though she had said no such thing. We crossed the school lawn and found our way to a different classroom, now empty of kids, where my babysitter also worked as a teacher’s aide, and he explained the situation across a congregation of tiny orange chairs and asked if there was any possible chance that maybe I could stay with her for a couple days while he set things up for the train trip. “I’m so sorry to impose,” he said. “She just loves you very much.” The babysitter knelt and hugged me. We had not spent loads of time together, but I had cherished every moment with her. She was fun, and kind, and had these huge obsidian eyes, so beautiful they seemed to be filled from some magical source of lava inside her and when a tear dripped from the corner of her eye I was honestly surprised it was clear. “Your wife called this morning,” she told him, nodding. “I think it would be okay. We’ll have a little sleepover. My place is small, though!” “I’m small,” I said, and she laughed, lightly. “It’s true. You are small.” “She is small,” echoed my uncle, not a tall man, and she bowed her head, as if we were elves.
5
When I was old enough to travel back to Portland by myself, nearly ten years later, I took the plane up to visit my mother in the residential facility where she had moved, and now lived. My mother had stayed—and still stays—in the same place she transferred to after the hospital so many years ago, a two-level sprawling building called Hawthorne House located in the southeast quadrant of the city, and it was a very good choice, a desired option with a wait list and excellent ratings. They’d primarily built it for the elderly, but sometimes also took the mentally ill as it was a fai
rly large facility and they were eager to fill beds. I had been there many, many times since my move, sometimes a few times a year, but always accompanied by my aunt and/or uncle. This was to be my first trip solo.
I consider this visit my earliest real attempt to make some sense of the unusual events that had happened while I was leaving Portland to move to Los Angeles. That it failed so plainly may be part of the reason it has taken me so long to look at it all again.
* * *
—
The trip was planned for a Saturday to make it easier for everyone. I would fly up in the morning and return on the last flight of the day, home by nine p.m., as usually happened when I flew up with my aunt or uncle. This way we saved the money we would’ve spent on a hotel, and it kept the visit short, and focused.
On the day of my flight, at five-thirty in the morning, seventeen years old, I went downstairs to find the humming motor and brilliant headlights of Aunt Minn’s car in the driveway already waiting to take me to the airport. She was sitting quietly in profile in the driver’s seat, eyes weary, cardigan soft around her shoulders. I hadn’t heard much of her getting ready in the house, just soft movement through rooms like a wraith, and some whispers to Uncle Stan from their doorway that seemed related to getting Vicky breakfast even though she would probably be back before Vicky was even awake. We lived so close to the Burbank Airport, and Vicky was sound asleep, her door cracked open to let in the light from the hall. The rest of the house was dark. Shuttling patterns of tree leaves moved over the windows as if it were the middle of the night. As we drove away from the house and turned the corner onto Magnolia, the streets opened up before us, straight and empty, drained of cars, the shadowy lumps of the Verdugo Mountains faintly visible in the near distance.
