The Edge of Every Day

by Marin Sardy

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  When people first meet my mother, she peers up at them expectantly, immediately asks how their day has been, and often says something disarmingly cute. She’s fond of giving gifts, doling them out almost as offerings to the gods: a coupon for a latte at Starbucks, a brochure for a luxury cruise in the Caribbean. “Look at this,” she’ll say, holding up the photo of a jewel-blue seascape. “You may be interested in doing something like this in the future. Maybe this will give you ideas.”

  She may or may not decide to say something risky. And if she does, it may or may not be apparent that it’s a delusion. Often it’s necessary to know the people she mentions in order to know whether what she’s saying is true. Relating to my mother involves a delicate interplay between realities, one that few people are prepared to learn. My role is to be her translator. When she speaks to friends of mine, I try to stand slightly behind her so I can signal—a sharp nod or a quick shake of the head—to indicate whether they should interpret a given story as fact or fantasy.

  When my mother first met my husband, Will (then a new boyfriend), in a Santa Fe bookstore, she pulled a book on Italian cooking off the nearest shelf and asked if he liked Italian food. She concentrated hard for a moment, and as she continued I could see her working her way toward a thought. It was clear from her manner that she was seeking, not scheming—listening, perhaps, to the ruler of her secret world. Then she announced that my dad was a friend of the book’s celebrity-chef author, Giada De Laurentiis. Only after we left could I tell Will that my dad had never met Giada De Laurentiis—though he does make great Italian food. The delusion apparently sprang up as my mother was speaking.

  Other things my father has done, according to my mother, include being swept away in a tsunami in Hawaii in the mid-eighties. As she tells it, he drowned, and in the confusion, another man appeared and took his place. This man was very helpful and began taking care of us, and after a while nobody noticed anymore that he wasn’t our real dad. He let everyone call him by our dad’s name, and for a while my mother believed that he was the real thing. But a few years later she caught on, and when I was about twelve she explained to me that the man I called Dad was not actually my father but a replacement. “I call him Mr. Ree,” she said. I didn’t catch the significance of the name until Alicia sardonically spelled it out for me: “Myster-ry.”

  As the rest of us experienced it, my mother divorced my father in 1984, when I was ten, in a period of sustained and probably paranoia-based rage, after nearly a dozen years of marriage and the birth of four children. Dad, still largely in denial of her descent into psychosis, bought and moved into the house next door, and we settled into a joint custody arrangement just as the true extent of her illness became clear. Years later, when I asked him why he hadn’t fought for sole custody, he said, “I just couldn’t do that to your mother.” For the rest of my childhood, my dad was in that same house and my mother stayed within the neighborhood. We moved back and forth between the two houses about once a week.

  For years my mother would refer to my dad only as Ree. “How is Ree?” she would say when I was at her house. “Are things okay over there at his house?”

  At some point in my teens, I dryly asked her if it bothered her that her children were being raised by a stranger.

  “Well,” she said, “he seems to be a nice enough man and he has really, truly accepted this work of taking care of you kids. So I guess it’s worked out okay.”

  Her mind is forever another country, a long-lost homeland that only she has seen. And I am her bridge, even when I can’t see one side from the other.

  Nowadays my mother’s delusions fade in and out, and with these shifts her memory changes. Sometimes she still calls my dad Ree, and other times by his real name. It was not long after their divorce that he first became Mr. Ree—not long after he, in a last-ditch effort to get help for her, had her briefly committed at the state psychiatric hospital. During the next two or three years, her rage and paranoia toward him were so thick that she couldn’t speak to him without shouting, and for a while she wouldn’t allow him to see her face. She kept her head shrouded in a scarf when she drove up his driveway to drop us off. Now, when her stolen-house delusions turn toward the cabin he owns and when she tells me why it rightfully belongs to her, he is Ree. But when, maybe, she hasn’t thought about him for a while and isn’t upset about anything relating to him, Ree slips away and he is himself once again.

  The hardest losses for me to witness are this kind—not of home or fortune but of the relationships her illness has made so difficult. Or impossible, as with anyone she comes to fear or mistrust through her paranoid beliefs. I know she feels these losses as much as any. The inevitable by-product is her own loneliness.

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  —

  Even for my sisters and me, loving our mother is never simple. My younger sister, Adrienne, is an ongoing point of confusion, because she usually goes by her nickname, Sadie. My mother seems to assume that Adrienne and Sadie are different people, but she doesn’t take issue with the double identity. I didn’t even realize that this was the case until one of my aunts mentioned a conversation she had with my mother while Adrienne was traveling in Asia.

  “Is Adrienne still in India?” my aunt asked.

  “Yes,” my mother answered, “and I think Sadie is too.”

  For a few years she also thought there were two of Alicia. I may be the only one who remains singular, and I admit this has always been a little bit of a relief for me—although I know my doppelgänger could emerge at any time.

  “Mom,” I once asked her, “don’t you think it’s strange that I’m the only one there has never been two of?”

  “Oh, I know!” she said. “Isn’t that remarkable? It’s just amazing how things can happen sometimes. Everyone but you!”

  For many years, my mother was sure that my brother had, like my father, been swept away in a tidal wave in Hawaii and that this little boy who called her Mom was another child. This boy, this false Tom, was just as sweet as her Tom, however, so she embraced him as her own. But she worried that the real Tom was still out there, lost and alone. She only hoped someone kind and loving had taken him in.

  She has found lost children everywhere she’s gone. They’re always young people, often travelers, and when she speaks of them to me, it is to ask for my help in keeping an eye out in case they might need shelter or a surrogate family. “You can adopt each other!” she says sometimes. One of her more elaborate delusions involves an actual organization, the Arc of Anchorage, which in reality provides support for people with disabilities but which she says offers the service of facilitating the process by which people can adopt each other. Because there are so many of these orphans wandering around, she explained to me, somebody decided to help them take care of each other.

  When my brother was still alive, she often suggested that I adopt him. She knew, because I told her, that he was in Anchorage but that on any given day I didn’t know where he was. I didn’t know what she made of that. She hadn’t seen him for several years. But I could tell that she knew, from her own observations and intuition, that her son was struggling and isolated.

  “Any news from up north?” she asked me every time we talked. This was her way of saying, “Have you heard from your brother?”

  “Not lately,” I almost always answered.

  “Why don’t you give the house a call?” she suggested next.

  “You mean Dad’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t reach Tom by calling Dad’s house,” I said. “He doesn’t like to go to Dad’s house.” For a long time I used this reply to evade what I never had the heart, or the guts, to explain. But when Adrienne told me she had already tried to explain that Tom was mentally ill, with unclear results, I thought I should give it a try too. When I visited Santa Fe a few months later, my mother
asked for news from Alaska. I looked at her squarely. “I can’t call Tom because I don’t know where he is,” I said. I took a breath. “He’s homeless. He lives on the street.”

  She looked down, her face furrowed in annoyance, and began picking a cuticle.

  “Tom has schizophrenia, Mom,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t say that!” she said, pulling her hands back close to her body, still looking down and picking at her fingers.

  “That’s why I can’t call him.” She wouldn’t look at me.

  “Come on, now, Marin! Let’s not talk about that today.”

  My words sounded cruel in my ears as they grated across her. But I hate to hide the truth from her. Her mind does that so brutally well already.

  “Tom is going to deal with his life,” she said sternly, “the way he decides to. Now let’s not talk about this.” I realized she had already thought this through. And she got it right—for years my brother refused help from anyone, even help to get off the street. She understood, perhaps better than anyone, that his struggles were ultimately his to overcome.

  The balm for these rough times comes in the small moments, the easy ones. Moments when nothing can be gained or lost, when one of us notices something lovely in the world: She sees a bird outside the window and remarks at the brilliance of its red wing. She bends to pet my dog and comments on how daintily she lifts her paw. For all the confusion and fear induced by her ever-reconfiguring world, it also grants her the full richness of its magic.

  Driving down the road in Santa Fe one spring morning, when a gust of wind picked up a spray of fallen pink petals and swirled them over the road in front of my car, I wished she were there to see it. I knew she would feel its beauty and for a moment be filled by it. I miss her whenever I have these moments alone. One day in Central Park, I walked past a shadowy grove of leafless trees after a morning rain had left their branches laden with drops of water, clinging so densely that they seemed like pearls strung along the undersides of the limbs. “Mom!” I wanted to say. “Look at the droplets of water shining on the trees!”

  “Oh!” she would reply, “isn’t that lovely!” Her voice would be high, captivated. She would pause. Her bubble in space-time would encompass us both, and for a moment I would feel as if the entire world began and ended there.

  Chokecherries

  In the early years, when my mother was still sane, she cut lengths of pussy willow branches at Easter and arranged them in vases. Not yet budded, they came laden with soft silver pods like rabbits’ feet. She took colored powders and dusted the furry pods. Pale yellow, pink, lavender, blue.

  * * *

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  She told my father, “They’re trying to kill us.” She said, “They’re coming after us.” She said, “They are a band of assassins hired by the CIA to kill the families of ex–Green Berets.” He said to her, “That doesn’t make any god damn sense.”

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  Reality is slippery. If someone tells you something often enough for long enough, regardless of whether it’s true, you begin to believe it. Or at least you might begin to doubt your own perceptions, think, Maybe she knows something I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe there’s something here that I don’t understand.

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  Neuroscientists, when asked to define “the mind,” suggest that it is a process—an emergent property that arises from the brain and regulates its flow of energy and information. Some also say that the mind is not strictly an embodied process but rather a relational one, emerging not only from the brain but also from interactions with other minds.

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  At night, my father’s voice came from the living room up the stairwell, loud, rising over my mother’s as he told her: “No, no, no.” I fell asleep to the muffled sound of shouts. It was a strange silence when she kicked him out and he moved into his own place down the street, so that her house was still as I drifted off.

  * * *

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  Her delusions were astonishing. That assassins had implanted a radio transmitter in her brain. That they had left a wad of gum on the carpet or dropped a toothpick in line behind her at the grocery store, as death threats. She blocked the door with furniture every night.

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  She took my sisters and brother and me to hotels when she thought they were watching us. We slept there on school nights, displaced, broken from our routine as she remade our world. When we stayed home she paced in the darkness, peering into our bedrooms to check on us. In the car, she told us to duck and hide behind the seats. At first we went along with it, wanting to believe her.

  * * *

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  It occurs to me that mental illness and madness are not the same thing. Mental illness is a set of brain malfunctions with psychological effects, like paranoia, delusions, insomnia. Madness is a state of incoherence—paradoxical, or nonsensical, or untenable. Madness sometimes arises from mental illness, but it may arise in other ways as well. This distinction is important because mental illness is not contagious, but madness often is.

  * * *

  · · ·

  In 1989, computer science student Mark Humphrys developed an artificial intelligence program, called MGonz, that was designed to mimic human conversation. When MGonz was ready, Humphrys posted it online and left for the day. While he was gone, a user with the screen name Someone sent Humphrys’s account the salutation “finger,” an early command used to make contact with remote users. MGonz replied, “Cut this cryptic shit speak in full sentences.” Someone was apparently insulted. The two proceeded to argue, heatedly, for an hour and a half. The next day, Humphrys found the contents of the conversation log to be so profane that he wasn’t sure he could publish his findings.

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  My mother hung baskets of flowers by the front door. She was fond of the drooping vines with red and purple blooms that looked like their name, bleeding hearts. The words for one thing became the words for another thing. Language stepped sideways, doubled, flipped. This idea intrigued me, even more so when I began to understand that she now spoke in code. “Don’t go outside” meant “I’ve lost my mind.”

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  After my parents’ divorce, my mother would call and yell at my father over the phone, attacking him for things he hadn’t done and hadn’t said. If we were at his house, he refused to fight with her in front of us. “Okay,” he would say into the receiver, his tone barely contained. “I gotta go now. Bye. Goodbye.” He told us he was going to be rational with her even when she was irrational.

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  Folie à deux: a psychiatric syndrome in which a delusional belief is transmitted from one individual to another living in close proximity. Typically, both people involved have a delusional disorder, but the delusion is generated inside only one mind and then spreads and takes root in the other. The term translates as “madness shared by two.” Recognized as a phenomenon in scientific literature since the nineteenth century, folie à deux has confounded doctors for two centuries, because it is not compatible with the Western concept of the mind as separate and distinct to an individual brain.

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  We were kids. We forgot appointments. We forgot to put the milk away. We forgot our shoes at our mother’s house. My father told us, “You forgot because you don’t care. You don’t care, that’s why.” He said it to us over and over, a chant, a prayer. “You think that’s what I’m here for. You think I’m here to clean up your messes. Because you don’t give a god damn.” If I said to him that I did care, that I always cared, he told me, “No, you don’t. You don’t care.”

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  Yarrow filled the edges of the front garden, sprouting clusters of tiny
white flowers that were impossible to pluck. The thick, stringy stem was too strong. I tried twisting and pinching, but nothing worked. I yanked until the entire two-foot stalk, roots and all, gave way.

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  Researchers who study artificial intelligence categorize verbal abuse, as well as typical argumentative posturing, as modes of communicating that are “stateless.” Stateless conversations proceed only from the last thing the last speaker said. The progress of a stateless conversation is detached from all context. This was how MGonz succeeded in tricking Someone into believing it was human. When MGonz didn’t know what to say next, it masked its limitations by falling back on off-topic put-downs like “You are obviously an asshole.”

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  My mother cut a square out of the living room carpet, one foot by one foot, saying it had a bad smell. She would sit for hours, staring at the space in front of her, silent, still, a ghost in her own life. When she spoke, her words were charged, full, irrelevant. In the kitchen, we foraged for breakfast.

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