Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

  The rest of the session was more of the same. The questions, which bled into one another, set Will on edge: “Do you have trouble sleeping?” “Do you feel detached from other people?” “Do you find you don’t feel pain or joy—just a constant sense of unease?”

  By the end of the session, Will had a bad feeling he’d qualified for whatever mental defect Doc Martin had been screening him for—a suspicion that only grew when the shrink asked Will to “hang out” in the waiting room while he had a few words with Will’s dad.

  Will tried not stare at or judge the only two other people in the waiting room: a morose woman who stank of cigarettes and her buzz-cut son who had an air of aggression and ADD. Will sat and read. He eschewed the Scholastic magazines and sat in the corner leafing through Psychology Today. Inside was an article about how vegetarians like Violet have overall worse mental health than meat eaters. When no one was looking, he brought the magazine to the bathroom and tore out the page, folding and pocketing it to show his mother later.

  During the drive home, Will’s father turned off at a roadside hot dog truck. Will looked at Douglas skeptically as he returned to the car with a mustard-slathered schlong in each hand.

  “Mom and I don’t eat hot dogs,” Will said.

  “Well, Mom’s not here,” Douglas said with an edge in his voice.

  “They’re as unhealthy as cigarettes. We read that. They cause genetic mutations.”

  His father sighed and balanced the second hot dog on the emergency brake between them. He’d insisted Will ride in the passenger seat, even though Will argued he was still a year too young (the department of motor vehicles said you had to be thirteen).

  Douglas napkin-dabbed the mustard from the corner of his mouth. “Will, what are your feelings about going back to public school?”

  Will’s feelings on the matter were a lot like the feelings he’d have if he were trapped under the axle of a seventy-ton truck. A crushing weight settled onto his chest, and the air in the car seemed too thick to breathe.

  “That’s impossible,” Will said with a croak of anger in his voice. “My epilepsy—” And he tried his damnedest to list all of the reasons his mother always named about the school’s fluorescent lights and lack of carpeting.

  “Well, Dr. Martin isn’t entirely sure about your epilepsy. And your other doctors aren’t either. The fact that your EKGs are normal and you’re still having attacks even though you’re on seizure medication mean something else might be going on.”

  “Something like what?”

  “An anxiety disorder, for one. Panic attacks.” Douglas reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a photocopied article about something called psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES).

  “This says it happens to war veterans and mothers in custody battles. Overworked adults.”

  “Unh-uh, read it to the end.” His father pointed to the part in the article that talked about how PNES happened when people with “poor coping mechanisms” faced “unstable relationships” or “stressful life events.” Douglas added, “Fifty-four percent of people with these anxiety attacks are misdiagnosed as epileptics.”

  “I’m not going back to Stone Ridge Elementary! I am epileptic!” He tried to calm himself with the possibility of boarding school. He reminded himself that he and his mother already had a plan in mind.

  “I’m not saying I don’t believe you. It’s just that I’ve never seen you have a seizure, so I can’t confirm what I haven’t seen.”

  “My memory goes funny. Like the last time—”

  “Dr. Martin thinks something else might explain that.”

  “What?”

  “Turn to the second sheet.”

  Will tossed aside the handout on PNES and was confronted with a fact sheet titled TRAUMA AND DISSOCIATION. It talked about the way some people disconnect from their bodies, feelings, memories, and awareness during times of extreme stress. It was a coping mechanism, the author wrote, a way to split ourselves off from things we don’t feel equipped to deal with. Some people, like rape victims, experienced trauma as if they were watching themselves from fifty feet off the ground. Others failed to remember whole days at a time, even as they worked, shopped, and socialized, going about their lives like automatons.

  “That doctor told you I have this? This is for, like, army men returning from war. Or kids who’ve lost their families in tsunamis.”

  “Dr. Martin said it’s much more common in people who’ve been traumatized by someone they know and trust. I have to take this seriously,” Will’s dad said, balling his napkin in one fist. “This is the second time this week a psychologist has talked to me about post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  Will’s mind went to all the doctors he’d been to before his autism diagnosis. “One of my old doctors said I had it too?” he asked, brain-stunned and fighting tears.

  “No,” Douglas said, sucking air. “No. I meant Violet’s therapist. She thought Violet’s Buddhist meditations—pacing around her room all night—were just an attempt to shut off extreme anxiety.”

  “But who was it who was meant to have traumatized us?” The words had barely left Will’s mouth before his mind went to Rose. Had she abused him and Violet? And had their clever, self-preserving psyches changed the channel in an effort to block it out?

  Douglas cast a spooked, guilty look in his direction.

  Will comforted himself with the reminder that nothing too terrible could have happened to him. His mother had been there. Josephine had always been with Will, and perhaps that was why. Maybe, just maybe, Will’s mother had turned overbearing in reaction to something. Maybe she was sheltering Will against a very real storm.

  VIOLET HURST

  VIOLET WAS CAREFUL on the approach when she caught sight of Sara-pist strolling down the hall. She was walking with a colleague the patients called Dr. Shrink Wrap, on account of the bad Botox that had given his face a strange, shiny film. Much as she wanted to, Violet was not going to charge up, loud and emphatic, demanding to know whether the woman thought she was a compulsive liar.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Violet said. “I just wanted to thank you for making me stay. This has been such a big week for me. Everyone in the twelve-step program says it’s just the pink-cloud stage, but I’ve had a lot of insights.”

  Sara-pist looked surprised, but willing. “Come. Walk,” she motioned. Very next thing, Violet was in her supremely depressing office, sitting on her melancholy-colored microsuede couch.

  “So you mentioned before that my mother stopped returning your calls?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you saw my dad yesterday, when he came to visit?”

  A wary look crept into Sara-pist’s face. “Yes. Your father and I spoke a lot about his alcoholism. He feels a certain amount of responsibility for your drug use. He expressed worry that you’d inherited his disease, and that his own addiction put blinders on him. He said he wished he’d been more aware of your problems.”

  “I know genetics can play a part in addiction. I get that. But I’m the reason I take substances. I take them because I feel like I need to numb out who I really am and be who my mother wants me to be.”

  “And who does your mom want you to be?”

  “The bad seed. Someone she can point her finger at when she falls down on the job. But I don’t have to be the bad one. Playing that part isn’t making my family any better. It’s just making it worse.”

  “Ummm.”

  Violet couldn’t get a read on Sara-pist. She meant everything she said, but still she didn’t know if she was strengthening or weakening her case for her mental health.

  “Being here has taught me that I can’t pick and choose emotions. When I stop feeling fucking terrified, I stop feeling glad too. I’ve been numb for so long. I think I wanted to die because I wanted my insides and outsides to match. I tried suicide because I already felt dead.”

  A smile crept across Sara-pist’s face. “That does sound like an insight. And ha
s this new awareness brought you to a place where you feel ready to let go of some of these behaviors?”

  Violet nodded. “I can see now that I was identifying with my”—she struggled for a calm, but accurate word—“aggressor. One of my friends here, Edie … She helped me see that I was torturing myself by the same methods someone else used to torture me.”

  “And who would that someone else be?”

  “My mother. Edie thinks she sounds like a narcissist.”

  “I can’t speak to the mental health of anyone without meeting them. And I can’t diagnose anyone who doesn’t come to me, willing to change and actively seeking my help.”

  “Ethics.” Violet nodded. “I understand.”

  “I will say, it is more or less common wisdom that having a narcissistic mother is one of the worst things that can happen to a kid. Her inability to empathize, her persistent misreading of her child’s inarticulate but urgent social cues, her tendency to feel criticized by her child’s discomfort, her desperate need to come off like a good mother, at the risk of actually being one … all these things severely disrupt a child’s development. Children of narcissists tend to feel guilty and dangerous even if they’ve never stood up for themselves, never committed a crime.”

  Now was the time to bring up the knife. “I didn’t commit that crime against my brother. I’m willing to take responsibility for a lot of things, but not that. I’m not in the business of julienning anyone’s fucking hands. But I do feel guilty to an extent. Because even though I didn’t hurt Will, I’ve stood by for years, watching him get hurt.”

  “Hurt how?”

  “Hurt, isolated. Hurt, smothered. Hurt, used to prop my mother up and make her feel special.”

  “Did it ever occur to you to intervene?”

  “No. By all appearances, it looked like affection. I mean, I was even jealous of Will. Time was, I was jealous of Rose. Both of them seemed to get more attention and approval than I ever got.”

  “But was it love, really?”

  “Of course not. It was exploitation. It was abuse tarted up like love.”

  “Maybe that’s why you’re afraid to be seen. That’s why you’re so afraid of having a real relationship with your sister. You’re scared because intimacy feels like terror. Because, at least where your mother’s concerned, terror is the only kind of closeness you’ve known.”

  “So, you don’t think I’m a compulsive liar?”

  Sara-pist’s face remained neutral. “It doesn’t matter what I think. Is lying something you’re ready to admit you struggle with?”

  “I don’t think so, but I want to know if that’s my diagnosis. I found out from some friends that my mom called them. She said I’d been diagnosed as a compulsive liar.”

  “Violet, I haven’t spoken to your mother since your intake.”

  Yes, she was glad she was asking questions. Before, Violet might have just accepted her own supposed “lying” as fact and slunk off to some corner with a shit-ton of self-loathing, a dime bag, and a stack of Buddhist self-help books about truth in speech. She might have accepted that drugs had given her some neurological deficit. Now, she was prepared to find out exactly what Rose and, possibly, her parents were hiding. Josephine wanted honesty; she was about to get it. Her little girl was not so little now.

  “Here’s my three-day letter,” Violet said, standing to pass Sara-pist the sheet of art paper it was written on. “I want to be released or I want my court hearing.” She needed to get back to her friends before Josephine fixed things so she didn’t have a single friend left in the world.

  WILLIAM HURST

  WILL AND HIS dad returned from Dr. Martin’s office to an empty house. His mother hadn’t returned from whatever field trip she’d taken alone, and without the Hurst women, Old Stone Way was as impressive and eerie-cold as a mausoleum.

  Will watched his father switch on lowbrow talk radio and flick on all the downstairs lights. Still, the light and sound did nothing to lessen the awkwardness that hung around the kitchen the way the smell of old fry oil might.

  “So,” Will’s dad said. “Should we get on with your school lessons?”

  Will was floored by the idea of his dad playing at being his teacher. “It’s pointless to do it without Mom,” he said. “I’d rather start fresh tomorrow.”

  “Will, if you’re home, you need to be studying and keeping school hours. This is serious business. Especially given CPS has been here. We need to be able to account for your academics—”

  Will’s anger flared. The tension that had been building all day reached Will’s mental brim and he simply boiled over. “Look, Dad”—he said his father’s name with acid on his tongue—“you are not a teacher the way Mom is a teacher. You don’t have her patience. You don’t have her enthusiasm or her intellectual curiosity. And you definitely don’t have her knowledge of the subject matter.”

  “I don’t know how your mother’s managed to convince you she’s teacher of the year.”

  “She’s an academic.”

  “Not since I last checked. Not since she was fired.”

  “Mom left SUNY. She left so she could teach me.”

  “Is that what she told you?” Douglas’s jaw went tight. “Will, your mother got fired for having a fake degree. She got her PhD from some kind of diploma mill. It was good enough for her. She never considered it might not work for her students or her employer.”

  Tarradiddle: lie; falsehood; nonsense.

  “That’s not true! I held Mom while she cried over the decision to quit her job. She kept going back and forth, she couldn’t decide what to do.”

  “The decision to leave SUNY wasn’t hers to make.”

  Will wouldn’t stand for it. He refused to stand there and let his father, who’d done nothing for Will, talk slander about his mother, who’d done everything for him.

  “Fine. I’ll do schoolwork,” Will huffed. “Today’s the day for music class.” (It wasn’t.)

  Will stormed to the piano and pounded out a one-handed Shostakovich waltz for close to an hour. The keys were literally a safe instrument for Will’s sudden, Russian-esque angst. Plus, as long as Will’s hand kept moving, his father couldn’t talk to him about public school or his so-called hidden traumas. Will didn’t need to hear any more about Doc Martin’s bogus diagnosis. It didn’t matter if his father accepted his Asperger’s. He was getting away from his dad. Success was the best revenge of all, and soon enough Will was going to be at a pretentious—make that prestigious—prep school. He’d be studying economics and hanging out with boys who “summered” instead of “vacationed.” One day he’d go to Oxford or the Sorbonne. His dad could kiss his Top-Siders. His dad could eat his number-two pencil dust.

  When Will finally tired and gave up the piano, he looked out the window and saw his father on a ladder, cleaning clogged gutters in the rain. Beneath the hood of his slicker, Douglas’s face flashed through a strange montage of anguish, shame, and determination. Too little, too late, Will thought, watching. The home maintenance, the delayed concern with CPS, the sudden interest in Will’s schoolwork and Will’s health. It was all too little, too late. The storm had already struck. The downspout was already clogged. The effects of the neglect were already cascading down on them, pouring straight into the Hursts’ foundation.

  Will wandered into the kitchen, where the talk-radio show droned on.

  The DJ’s voice was guttural and cheesy: What personal item do women say they can’t live without? I’m guessing it’s cotton balls. Tell me, what do you ladies do with all those cotton balls?

  Will was headed for his mother’s secret stash of truffles when he noticed his father’s cell phone buzzing on the counter. The phone’s high volume, combined with the DJ’s faux-deep voice, made Will so feel so emotionally flooded, so irrationally angry, that he picked up the phone in a left-handed death grip.

  KERRY, read the caller ID.

  Classy. The home-wrecker spelled her name with a K.

  Will wasn�
��t sure what he was thinking when he answered the call. More likely, he wasn’t thinking. He was in the midst of an emotional emergency—a five-alarm fire—and he was simply responding to the bell.

  “Stop calling here!” Will screamed. “My dad is married! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  He didn’t wait for the trollop to respond. He didn’t need to hear her justifications any more than he needed to hear her voice.

  Will had barely stabbed the End Call button before the phone began to ring again. It continued ringing as he took the box of Lindor truffles off the shelf and ate three without tasting a thing.

  Will’s eyes flashed daggers when Douglas hustled across the kitchen to answer the third or fourth missed call (“Kerry, hi. I’ve been up to my neck in clogged gutters”). He wandered out of the room, jacket dripping all over the clean floors, with an expression that was meant to look relaxed or, at the very least, not guilty. But Will knew better. Will knew his father was a cheater and a lush.

  Fourth Lindor truffle. Will popped it in his mouth all at once and felt a line of chocolate-infused drool roll down the center of his chin.

  Will remembered his mother’s words: Do you think you’d feel better after a drink, Douglas? Is that it? And he wondered, deviously, whether a glass of wine would help his father ease up on the CPS/PTSD/public school stuff. He used the kitchen step stool to take down a crystal glass. The bottle he and his mother had bought the day before still sat, half-full and corked on the counter. Will eased the cork out and sloshed the ravishing-red liquid to the brim of the glass. He left it on the counter like a wordless invitation to his dad.

  More sexist chatter on the radio. Phone-in listeners called in to report they “couldn’t live without” their bronzers, ChapSticks, and eyelash curlers.

  When Douglas returned, his eyes went directly to the full glass on the counter.

  Ebrious: Inclined to drink to excess. Or in Douglas’s case, a hiccupping, pants-pissing, word-slurring, lose-all-mental-capacity kind of drunk.