The Edge of Every Day
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According to postmodern theorists, every story that is told masks the absence of every other story that could have been told in its place. What is absent matters as much as what is present. When my father yelled about our failures, he left no room for other things we might have communicated. We didn’t talk about life at our mother’s house. We didn’t say what frightened us, or why. We didn’t risk appearing vulnerable. We didn’t ask for help understanding the things that confounded us, like sanity and insanity. So our own lives became unreal, even as they overwhelmed us.
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In the front yard grew a massive chokecherry tree. Chokecherries were beguiling blue-black balls that, when squeezed, bled purple juice. I tasted one once, feeling the burst of liquid so bitter it felt dry, stripping my mouth of its moisture as it spread across my tongue to the back of my throat, closing it up. For a moment I could not breathe, swallow, speak.
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Once, when I skinned my knee, my father said, “I don’t do sympathy. You can go to your mother for that.” He said, “Your mother’s great at that kind of thing.” This was long after an opaque and distant stillness had overtaken her. I had by this time forgotten that she had ever been great at that kind of thing. I looked at him and wondered what he was talking about.
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Recent case studies involving folie à deux report that a delusion, generated internally by the dominant person in a relationship, can then be picked up by the non-dominant person and believed with equal commitment and intensity. But folie à deux does not lead to a sense of togetherness against a common foe. A delusional state is too solipsistic to allow for that. Rather, each individual experiences the shared delusion as entirely his or her own, each feeling singularly trapped and isolated within it.
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It only now strikes me as odd that my father refrained from yelling at our mother, for our sake, and then yelled at us when he was upset at her. He didn’t see the contradiction here.
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There were gooseberries. Pale green orbs with stripes a shade paler, and tufts of fiber at one end. Sour. They grew on the thorny bush in the backyard.
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We think of talking as a means of connecting with others, but as MGonz and Someone revealed, stateless conversation does the opposite. Verbal abuse supersedes and prevents connection, and it sustains an ongoing lack of connection. Instead it creates an illusion of connection that masks its actual absence. In my father’s house, the alienation was double, not just from each other but from the much larger questions that hung over us. Were we still a family? Would we turn out okay? Did we need him to be both a father and a mother? Could he rise to that challenge?
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Rhubarb sprouted in a shady strip of garden running along the edge of the deck, casually tended by my mother. I’ve learned, from the NIH website, that rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and anthraquinone glycosides. If ingested, the leaves cause burning in the mouth and throat, nausea, vomiting, weakness, diarrhea, seizures, coma.
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Sometimes, when little was at stake, sympathy flowed out of my father naturally. When I had the flu, he would walk softly into my room and whisper to me as he sat on the edge of my bed, fussing over my tissues and my glass of water and blankets. He did not blame me for the flu, didn’t take it as my failure, or his own. No one was implicated.
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Now I use language to nail things down. I prefer precise words. I like to say exactly what I mean. What I mean to ask: What is the mind? Where does it begin and end? What I mean to say: To answer these questions, the mind has only itself to turn to. What I mean to consider: Reality is an amalgam of perceptions and ideas whose validity is always being negotiated—and what we accept as real is what has been approved by consensus.
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Even after going back through conversations with my father in my mind and pinpointing the moments in which he departed from logic, from the realities of me and him—when he abandoned the observable truth about me for some idea he had formed before I even emerged from the womb—I would still ask myself, Is this somehow my doing? Is this somehow my fault?
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We gathered rhubarb stalks and munched on them raw. My mother told us not to eat the leaves. Only the stems were edible. The leaves, she said, were poison.
The Rumor*1
I was maybe thirteen when we heard the rumor that twice a year, on the equinoxes, it is possible to balance an egg on its end. The story went that on those days the earth’s gravitational pull is aligned just so, making it easy to keep the egg upright, whereas on most days this would be nearly impossible. It was said that this is especially true near the poles, and since we lived in Alaska, that put us in a good position to try it out. My dad was the kind of person who got excited about fun facts, so we pulled out a carton and each grabbed an egg. It was March, the first day of spring.*2
In my memory, the egg balancing worked brilliantly. Maybe it was Tom who got it to work first—on the big end—and the rest of us marveled and then worked doubly hard to balance our own. Soon we had three or four eggs standing on end on the countertop. We decided to leave them up to see how long they would stay that way. In the first few hours, one fell over when somebody bumped the edge of the counter, but we got it balanced again. A day later, another fell when someone jumped hard and shook the floor. But this time we couldn’t rebalance the egg. Progressing further from the equinox, it became easier to knock them down. The slightest vibration. Then once they were down we couldn’t get them back up again.*3
We loved our discovery about the eggs so much that in the fall we tried to balance them again, and again it worked. We decided to try it every equinox. So began our biannual ritual of the stand-up eggs. Inevitably each spring or fall somebody noticed the calendar in time to pull out the carton and leave an egg standing there for the rest of us to see—a marker of the world’s turning, earthly and cosmic and miraculous all at once. It seemed to confirm that reality was in fact as astonishing as we, with our mother as she was, observed it to be.*4
Over the years the eggs lost their sense of impossibility and became our cool thing we did. I didn’t think much more about it. Then when I was in college in Oregon, I asked a friend if she knew about the egg thing. She had never heard of it, nor had anyone else I ever asked. I tried it a few times on equinoxes and it never worked. I thought maybe it worked only in Alaska, close to the pole, but I didn’t get a chance to test it again. So I kept asking people. And people kept saying no, they hadn’t heard of that trick.*5
I have spent hours pondering those eggs. Did I imagine it all? I was the sort of kid who easily got confused when I remembered things, mixing up what I had seen, what I had dreamed, and what I had read about in novels. But no, I could not have imagined it. It happened every year. It was too normal—too taken for granted—to have been a fantasy. Eventually I asked Adrienne, who casually and easily recalled the ritual. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “yeah.” This is the only confirmation I’ve ever gotten. Once, wondering what the real explanation was, I hunted around online for a while, only to find the phenomenon consistently put down as a myth. Yes, the science geeks who conducted home experiments said, you can balance an egg on its end on the equinox—but that’s just because you can do it on any day, if you really try. They even tested it at different latitudes, including in Alaska. I found no other conclusions.*6
But no, I wanted to tell the egg experimenters. It wasn’t like that. It was so easy to stand up the eggs on the equinox. Not like any other day. We’d pop one up in a couple of seconds. We got good at it. If you left it there undisturbed, it
might stay standing for a week. But as the days passed, if it fell, it became notably more difficult to stand it back up. Until one day you stood there hunched over the countertop for half an hour and couldn’t get the egg upright at all.*7
I thought of our eggs when I read another woman’s account of her mother’s long psychotic episode during her teenage years. I thought of our eggs when she admitted that afterward, for a while, she had actually succeeded in convincing herself that her mother’s madness had never happened. I found myself frantic to prove that what I saw, what I did, was real.*8
It happened. I swear it. I know it. It happened. I see them still, those eggs. White on the white Formica. Smooth and faintly stippled, reflecting the countertop’s glow, soft in the pale light cast through the sliding doors. My brother is there, head down, the angles of his knuckles distinct as he maneuvers his egg, catches the sweet spot, pulls away. What was that? What was it? What?
*1 Notes on Insanity and Forgetting
*2 Those were the years when we lived half the time at our father’s house and half the time with our mother—all but Alicia who lived always with our father, avoiding our mother and her madness. My father’s approach to dealing with the fact of our mother’s illness was to confront it when it posed a direct threat to us, and otherwise ignore it. Early on in her psychosis, he tried to clarify for us what exactly was happening, carefully explaining what it meant to have “schizophrenic tendencies.” But he also decided that, when we were at his house, he would keep our minds off her problems by occupying us with other things.
*3 Our father rarely asked about what we saw at our mother’s house during those years. He didn’t bring it up. He resisted getting into it, even, and grew annoyed when we seemed sad. He was too overloaded to face the toll her illness took on us. And we, for our part, could not have spoken about it. What we saw defied articulation. Her erratic restrictions, wild delusions, extreme weight loss, sudden furies; her habit of giggling at nothing. And beneath those displays, there was the chasm growing between our mother and us. There was our intuition that we had lost some integral part of her forever.
*4 For what my father did offer—safety, optimism, directness—I am immensely grateful. And this is why it is painful to acknowledge that it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to be shown that life can be orderly, but to be taught no language with which to articulate chaos. To be given stability but not be allowed to express the costs of loss. So we turned our own minds inside out, playing two roles for two realities. We learned to redirect our feelings into any unrelated activity we could find. Anything benign. Anything that had nothing to do with schizophrenia.
*5 Because my siblings and I almost never spoke about our experiences with our mother’s problems, our father’s understanding of her illness was the one that reigned. But his grasp of it was thin. He had lived only briefly with the symptoms we saw daily, and for many years while I was growing up he didn’t see her at all. In that time, he couldn’t witness how emotionally incomprehensible she was, how delusional, how flattened, how rigid, how far away. He knew she could be bizarre, baffling—but even then he kept believing she was still the attentive, perceptive mother he had known her to be when we were very young. Our life with her became our hidden life, the story under the story.
*6 What’s most difficult now, when I look back on those years, is to realize what could have been changed for the better. There was no altering my mother’s psychosis as long as she refused to take medication, and for years I found a degree of solace in the impossibility of helping her. But it’s distressing to recall the way the illness was handled by my family. The breaking apart of lived reality and acknowledged reality. The new kind of madness this birthed.
*7 I looked first to my father to confirm what I saw in my mother, and I didn’t find it. Then in adulthood I asked aunts, uncles, grandparents about it. Some, in their retellings, erased whole decades of psychosis from the story. A few didn’t seem to fully grasp the simple, raw fact that their sister was profoundly disabled. Who could I believe? Who was bullshitting? Who was forgetting? Either my siblings and I had always known much more about our mother’s illness than anyone else in our family, or I’d had it wrong all along. Was she really that delusional? Was it really that bad?
*8 Nowadays, when I’m on the phone with my mother and she’s in a talkative mood, I compulsively type out her delusions: They come through smiling and invade your home…and if you resist in any way, they just kill you…Poaching is killing! Sometimes, looking later at the transcripts, I find myself floored. In all their pure verbatim glory, they still seem too extreme, too starkly impossible, to be what I actually heard. Without transcripts my memory tames them, rounds out the edges. Sometimes I wonder why I do it to myself, this transcribing. Why force myself to feel the full brunt of her insanity again and again? Maybe it is only in the truth of her illness, unabridged and uncensored, that I have been able to find some sanity of my own.
A World of Absolute Order
When I first began watching Svetlana Boginskaya compete, she was not yet a legend in the sport of gymnastics, not well known outside the Soviet Union. She was still a surprise and I was barely a teenager. That was near the beginning of my own gymnastics career, which started several years after Svetlana’s but to which I latched on quickly—having come to it, as it happened, by way of suddenly finding myself without a mother. The summer of the year my mother disappeared, my father had enrolled Adrienne and me in a beginner class to give us something to do while he was at work. So as I zipped through the list of skills to learn, mastering them in rapid succession, I was also contending with the fact that my mother had been altered, profoundly, by the mental illness that would cripple her for the rest of her life.
It is not coincidence that gymnastics became my escape from my family’s predicament, and it is not coincidence that I found Svetlana. My first years as a gymnast were years of watching my mother deteriorate, both as a parent and as a person—years in which I was discovering all the various and contradictory ways that I had lost her. Between the ages of twelve and eighteen, I never spent longer than two weeks away from a gym.
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What you noticed first about Svetlana when she stepped up to an apparatus was the length of her limbs. At nearly five feet, four inches, she was one of the tallest elite gymnasts in the world. This made the sport more challenging for her but more obviously had the effect of exaggerating her personal elegance, especially when she was in the air. When she began to move, those long lines took over, emphasizing the fluidity of her turns and accentuating her acrobatics so that in simple tumbling moves she seemed to hang in space for a beat or two.
She was known, too, as an exceptional twister. This became widely visible at the 1988 Olympics, in the floor routine that won her a silver medal and helped the USSR earn a team gold: Her first tumbling pass was a simple full-in-back-out—two tucked backflips in the air with a twist in the first one. Her second pass was a two-part sequence in which a laid-out front flip with one and a half twists led into a double-twisting layout—a laid-out backflip with two full twists. A grand total of four and a half twists. When she drove these moves home, it was viscerally gratifying to hear the slam of her feet on the floor. Flight, so many spins in the air that a novice viewer couldn’t keep track, then bam! Glue.
The landings. The full length of Svetlana’s body furled when she landed, almost like she was taking a bow. She bent much more deeply than most gymnasts do, particularly when vaulting or dismounting. Then, after that hammer-like motion nailed her feet to the floor, she arose from that low posture as if her spine were being unrolled by a dowel—one vertebra at a time. It was a subtle but remarkable habit that lingered in a viewer’s mind. Certainty, then a measure of grace.
Even in the earliest footage of Svetlana in competition—at the 1985 Junior Cup, when she was only twelve years old and not yet at her full adult height—she w
as already displaying the trademarks of her gymnastics style. She went on to win two team championships at the Olympics, in 1988 and 1992. All told, she took home five Olympic medals, three of them gold. In her eleven years competing at the international level, she also won a World Championship all-around title, collected various wins at World Cups and European Championships, and twice earned a perfect ten in the floor exercise. But she was distinct among champions—famous less for winning than for winning in a particular way. Exactly what way, however, is harder to articulate.
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I don’t follow gymnastics anymore. The sport has changed so much since I quit competing twenty-odd years ago that I don’t recognize many of the moves and am easily confused by the new elite scoring system. But Svetlana has stayed with me, clung to me, so that even now I can’t bring myself to refer to her by her last name. Young girls never know their idols that way.
What I recall is that in competition, she held a cool but potent gaze that revealed nothing and everything. She rarely smiled, but never came off as fierce. Serious. She was always serious. She had an air of inaccessibility. That was part of her allure. Her eyes—small, deep, almond-shaped, fully lined with black kohl—seemed dark although they were pale blue. She was beautiful, with a small nose and pert lips, and an announcer once noted her striking resemblance to the actress Rebecca De Mornay. When I watch her now I think of Russian ballet, of Tchaikovsky, as many Americans must have in 1988, upon seeing Soviet gymnasts again after Cold War boycotts had kept them out of our living rooms for more than a decade. Soviet gymnasts were noticeably more graceful than our powerhouse American competitors, and they tended to have a quiet composure rarely seen here. We were the land of Mary Lou’s mega-grin. With Svetlana, you could never tell if she was happy or if she was sad.