Waiting for Bojangles

by Olivier Bourdeaut

  “Cover up, Marigold, or you’re going to catch your death of cold,” he said with a concerned smile.

  “You’re absolutely right, George, what would I do without you! I love you, monsieur, did you know that?” she answered as she grabbed a fur hat from the rack.

  Then she disappeared, just a beat ahead of the startling sound of the door slamming. My father and I watched her from the balcony, striding regally, all-conquering chin up, ignoring the strange looks, taming the sidewalks, flicking away her cigarette, wiping her dancing shoes on the doormat before stepping inside the fish shop. My father answered her, belatedly, whispering with veiled eyes, “Yes, I do know you love me, Dove, but what am I supposed to do with all that crazy love? What am I supposed to do with all that crazy love?”

  Then Mom stepped out of the shop, smiling toward us as though she had heard him, with a tray of oysters perched on one arm, and two bottles squashing her breasts under the other. “She’s a miracle,” he sighed. “I couldn’t live without her. It’s inconceivable. That craziness belongs to me, too.”

  Sometimes she would throw herself into crackpot schemes with surprising enthusiasm. Then the enthusiasm would vanish, and the schemes as well; only the surprises stuck around. When she started writing her novel, she ordered reams of paper and boxes of pencils for writing, plus an encyclopedia, a big desk and a desk lamp. She moved the desk from one window to another, for inspiration, then pushed it against a wall, for concentration. But once she sat down, when neither concentration nor inspiration could be found, she’d get mad, toss the paper in the air, break the pencils meant for writing, pound her fists on the desk and turn out the lighting. Her novel was over without a single phrase having been scribbled on that ton of paper.

  Later, she decided to paint the apartment to increase its value. She shopped—for paint, brushes, rollers, toxic solvents, ladders, masking tape and rolls of plastic to protect the furniture, the parquet and the baseboards—until she dropped. Then, after draping the whole apartment in plastic and dabbing every imaginable shade of paint onto the walls, she gave the whole project up, saying she didn’t give a toss. All was lost, no matter what, and with or without paint, selling the place was our lot. For weeks, our apartment looked exactly like a huge walk-in freezer filled with food packaged compactly.

  Dad couldn’t bring himself to tease her; there was no point in trying to reason with her either. She did it all so matter-of-factly, not seeing what was the matter, that he gave up on all of his dreams. He watched his wife vanish down the rabbit hole, as mad as a hatter, along with her incongruous schemes. The real problem was that she was losing her mind and didn’t know where to find it. My father’s voice wasn’t enough to soothe her anymore, it seemed.

  One boringly ordinary afternoon, our lives went up in smoke. Thick, coal-black, chemical smoke. While my father and I were out shopping—for fine wine, bread and cheese, dish detergent and fresh peas—he decided we absolutely had to go to Mom’s favorite florist. “Lily adores his compositions; he’s far away, but her smile will make it worth the delay!” The delay was indeed a long one, what with the traffic, the numerous and punctilious clients, our meticulous search for a composition that was perfectly harmonious, more traffic, the hunt for a parking place, and then, in our street, a huge cloud. We were out of luck: in front of our building was a fire truck. From our living-room windows, thick dark smoke poured, while firemen fought a fire that roared, and flames licked crazily at our window frames. To reach the truck and the sirens’ din, we had to shove our way in through a huge mass of gawkers who didn’t want to let us through, despite our screams and hullabaloo. “Calm down, kid, stop pushing!” said a man who was blocking our way. “Besides, you’re too late, there’s nothing left to see anyway!” Dad had to punch him in the eye before he’d let us get by.

  “Flowers! Aren’t you two just too sweet!” Mom exclaimed, from under a shiny golden sheet. She was lying on the stretcher the firefighters had used to fetch her from the flaming inferno. She was safe, but there were no words to express our distress. Her face was streaked black and gray from the ash flurries, but she smiled as though she had no worries, even as our world crumbled around her. It nearly broke my heart when she said with good cheer, “Everything’s settled, my dears. I burned all our souvenirs, at least that’s one thing they won’t commandeer! Oh la la, it was hot in there, but everything’s fine now, except for my hair!” Then she tried to pat it back into place, as a fetching smile lit up her face.

  There were spitballs of burnt plastic stuck to her bare shoulders. “It’s all over, it’s all over,” my father mumbled between sighs. At a loss for words, he just patted her forehead, querying her with his eyes. No questions asked, no names given. Taking a breather from words, I settled for nibbling gently at her pitch-black hands, softening their harsh complexion with my noiseless affection.

  The fire chief explained that she had moved the mountain of mail into the living room, then piled all the photos in the house on top of it; she’d set fire to it all, and with the plastic sheets lining the walls, our living room had turned into a gigantic cauldron. They had found her crouching calmly in a corner of the front hall, holding a turntable and a large, panic-stricken bird. She had minor burns from the paper blaze, but nothing serious. Only the living room was affected; the rest of our apartment and the building had been spared. In a nutshell, the fire chief said, we had fared pretty well, and everything was almost all right. Although that remained to be seen.

  Nobody seemed to be able to show us the proof that everything was almost all right. Certainly not the police officers who interrogated Mom for a long time, stunned by her dancer’s regal poise and her answers’ surreal noise. “All I did was to destroy what I didn’t want to lose! Without all those stupid sheets of plastic, none of this would have happened!” “No, I don’t have anything against the neighbors. If I had wanted to burn them out, I would have set fire to their apartment, not my own!” “You want to know how I feel? Frankly, what’s the big deal? So much fuss, over a few bits of burnt paper that belonged to us!” Watching her answering their questions so cheerfully and calmly, Dad grabbed my hand so I wouldn’t let go of him. His eyes seemed dim. When they hosed our place down to put out the blaze, the firemen extinguished the light I’d always known in Dad’s gaze. He was becoming more and more like the Prussian cavalier in the painting: his face was young but cracked, and his clothes had obviously seen better days. Like them, he seemed to come from another era, his own having just come crashing to an end. You could look at him, but you couldn’t ask him anything.

  The clinic wasn’t able to show us the proof that everything was almost all right either. Only Mom thought everything was marvelous. “Why are we going to such a grim place? We could be dancing, it would be so much more entrancing than this! They sealed off the living room, but we can still dance in the dining room! Let’s play ‘Bojangles’! The record escaped unscathed! It’s so nice out today, isn’t there anywhere else we could play?” she chattered away lightheartedly. When we didn’t reply, she got a sad look in her eye. “You’re really no fun, my husband and son,” she groused, before setting foot inside that bleak house.

  When we first entered that place, and she saw the doctor’s concerned face, she teased him, looking pleased with herself. “My poor man, what’s wrong, why the face so long? If you have some time to kill, you should see a doctor for a pill! I suppose that being with the mentally ill all day long, you wind up taking some of it on, but you really don’t seem well. Even your white coat looks like hell!” Her quips elicited a wan smile from my dad, but absolutely not from the doctor, who asked with a sideways glance to be left alone with her. The discussion lasted three hours, and my father never stopped smoking as we paced back and forth in front of the depressing building.

  “You’ll see, this nightmare’s going to be over soon,” he kept saying over and over. “Everything’s going to be okay. She’ll get better, and when she returns, we’ll fête her. She’s as pretty and
witty as ever, no one that funny could be completely done for!” He said it so often that he wound up convincing me, and himself, too. So when the doctor asked to speak to him alone, he gave me a wink. A wink that meant this nightmare was going to be over soon.

  The doctor must not have agreed. When my father came back, the sight of his face was enough. In the blink of an eye, I knew that the wink had been an unwitting lie. “They’re going to keep your mother under observation for a bit, ’til they can get to the bottom of it. When she gets out, she’ll be as fresh as a daisy. It’s better that way. In the meantime, we’ll come to see her every day. This will all be over soon, so we mustn’t be lazy. We’ll get to work right away, fixing things up for her homecoming day. You pick the color for the paint, perhaps something quaint? We’ll have a great time, don’t worry—everything’s going to be hunky-dory!” he said with his mouth. But his sad eyes told a different story. My father never said anything untoward, but for my sake, he too was capable of lying backward and forward.

  6.

  The doctors explained that we had to protect her from herself in order to protect everyone else. Dad said that only doctors could come up with such a stupid thing to say. Mom was ensconced on the third floor of the clinic, with the people whose brains had moved out. Actually, for most of them, the move was still ongoing. Their minds were leaving little by little, so they chomped on pills as they waited patiently for everything to be taken away. In the hallway, there were lots of people who looked full and whole on the outside, but they were actually pretty much empty on the inside. The third floor was a gigantic antechamber to the fourth, where the mentally decapitated were. Patients on the fourth floor were a lot more fun. For them, the moving van had come and gone. The pills had cleared everything out, leaving nothing but madness and wind. When Dad wanted to be alone with Mom, for a slow dance with feeling, or to do things I was too young to understand, I liked to go for a stroll upstairs.

  Upstairs, there was Sven, my new Dutch friend, who spoke dozens of languages, often in the same sentences. Sven had wild hair and a nice face, with a weird tooth that stuck out in front and made him spray spittle everywhere. In his life before, Sven used to be an engineer, so he jotted tons of statistics down in his notebook. He could come across a little gruff, but he knew all sorts of important stuff. Like polo scores, for instance. You could ask him about any game, he’d flip though his notebook with insistence, and eventually, voilà! He’d find the score, and the winning team’s name, scribbled on some crumpled page. It was amazing.

  You could tell Sven had been to college, he was a regular fount of knowledge. The moving van had missed one room in his head that was still full to bursting. He was fascinated by the lives of the popes, too. He could tell you their nationality and date of birth, the length of their reign and even their girth. But what Sven liked most of all was pop music in French. He always had his Walkman attached to his belt and headphones around his neck. He was a regular jukebox, wandering around in his slippers and socks. He had a nice loud voice, and he put his heart and soul into it, which made his mouth water with delight. I would step back a bit when he sang, because I hated to get spittle on my face. Once Sven sang a Claude François song about a hammer in French, and I finally understood why Dad had turned Claude into a dartboard. If I had a hammer, I would have smashed Sven’s Walkman so he would stop singing that awful tune. But otherwise, I liked his songs, and I could listen to him sing all afternoon. I loved when he’d flap his arms like wings and sing at the same time. It really made you want to fly away with him. Sven alone was happier than all the doctors and nurses put together.

  There was Air Bubble, too. I made that name up for her, because she never answered when I asked her her name. Everybody should have a name, I thought, or at least a nickname. It’s better if you want to introduce them to someone. So I came up with one. With Air Bubble, it was clear: the meds had moved everything out, not a single box had been left behind. She was mentally decapitated full-time. She always had a sheet of movers’ bubble wrap in her hands, and she’d spend the whole day bursting the bubbles, staring at the ceiling and nibbling pills.

  She took other medications through her veins because she didn’t have much of an appetite. Her arm could swallow gallons without getting an ounce fatter, and even if she had, it didn’t really matter. A nurse told me that before she had moved out, Air Bubble had done some really nasty things, so the tablets kept her demons from refurnishing her brain. She popped bubbles because her head was full of air. That way, she was always in her element. When I’d had enough of Sven’s French songs, I’d go stare at the ceiling with Air Bubble. Listening to the little crackling sounds of the bubble wrap was very peaceful. Sometimes Air Bubble let her air escape all over the place, and then you had to run, because there was no medicine that could do anything about that.

  Air Bubble got a lot of visits from Yogurt, a weird guy who thought he was the president. His nickname wasn’t my idea, it was the staff’s. They called him that because his body overflowed from his clothes, and his skin was all pale and mushy. It really looked like he was going to ooze away on the spot. His brain had moved out, but the pills had moved a brand-spanking-new one in. Yogurt had these strange warts on his face, and he always had cookie crumbs around his lips. It was really off-putting. To hide how ugly he was, he dyed and shellacked his hair, standing it up in the back. He must have thought it was chic to have a crow wing sticking out like a beak. He spent so much time with Air Bubble that everybody at the clinic figured he must have had a crush on her. He would spend hours watching her burble and crush bubbles, while he told her what it was like to be president. All his sentences began with me, me, me, which was really exhausting after a while.

  In the hallways, he would glad-hand everybody he saw with a seriously funny look on his face, because he wanted their votes. Every Friday night he’d hold a political rally, then he’d organize an election with a cardboard ballot box. Sven would count the ballots and write down the tally in his notebook, then he would sing the results until Yogurt stood up on a chair to give his acceptance speech. He was a bit of a ham, but those elections made him as happy as a clam. Dad said he was a fool, with all the charisma of a kitchen stool, but everybody liked him anyway. He may have made a perfectly ridiculous president, but he was a perfectly nice patient.

  At first, Mom was bored stiff on the third floor. She said that if she had to be sent to the funny farm, she might as well be kicked upstairs to the fourth floor. She thought her third-floor neighbors were depressing, and moaned that the meds were no blessing. Her moods were unpredictable. She might be charming when we arrived, but go into hysterics when we were leaving. Or the other way around, which made it hard to stay. You had to be patient until the patient calmed down, and that could take awhile. Dad would keep the same smile plastered on his face the whole time. I thought it was strong and comforting, but on her bad days, my mother thought it was annoyingly cloying. It wasn’t an easy time for any of us.

  Fortunately, she had kept her sense of humor. She would do imitations of her neighbors for us: twisting up her face, slurring her words when she talked and dragging her feet as she walked. One afternoon, we got there to find her deep in conversation with a little bald guy who was wringing his hands and staring at his feet. He was strange looking: his face was all wrinkly, but his scalp was perfectly smooth. “Perfect timing, George, let me introduce you to my lover. You wouldn’t think so to look at him, but he can be quite the stud when he wants to be!” she declared, stroking his scalp as he nodded his head and giggled. Dad stepped in to shake Baldy’s hand. “Thank you, my friend,” he said. “Let’s make a deal: you take care of her when she’s screaming, and I’ll take over when she’s smiling. You’ll come out ahead, because she spends a lot more time screaming than smiling!” Mom burst out laughing, Dad and I did, too, and Baldy followed our lead and laughed even harder.

  “Now get out of here, you big screwball you, and come back in an hour or two. Who knows, maybe I’ll f
eel like screaming at you!” she said to Baldy, who was giggling on his way out the door.

  Another time, she greeted us with her head drooping, her arms hanging over the sides of her chair and drool oozing from her month. Dad fell to his knees, screaming for a nurse, but a second later, Mom sat straight up, giggling with childish mirth. She was the only one who enjoyed that prank. Dad had gone as white as a blank sheet of paper, and I had started blubbering like a baby; we really didn’t think it was the least bit funny. I was so scared I got mad. I told her that you shouldn’t play jokes like that on children. So she started nibbling me to apologize, and Dad told me that my anger was healthy and wise.

  Mom eventually became the boss of the whole third floor. She managed things cheerfully and competently, giving orders, bestowing honors, listening to major grievances and minor complaints, dispensing advice whenever necessary. So one day, Dad brought her a cardboard crown from a Happy Meal, but she laughingly turned it down. “A madwoman’s home may be her castle,” she crowed, “but I’m the Queen of the Funny Farm, of the Not Right in the Head, so bring me a funnel or colander crown instead!”

  The whole court filed through her chamber every day; it was a ritual. Besotted men—some even wearing suits—came to call, bringing her drawings, chocolates, poems or bouquets of flowers picked on the grounds (roots and all), or they just came to drink in her words. So Mom’s room soon turned into a miniature museum and a major mess, with odds and ends everywhere. It was touching, Dad said. He wasn’t the least bit jealous of the madmen. When we came into her room, he would clap his hands and all of her Mad Suitors hightailed it out of there, some of them hanging their heads, others apologizing. “See you later, sweethearts,” Mom would say, with a regal wave of her hand.