What was she, paranoid schizophrenic? What was she? Paranoid schizophrenic?
I wondered if I could slap him. I’d been lifting weights. I pictured his head flying down the hallway like a bowling ball, like in Alice in Wonderland.
Downtown Orlando was deserted except for homeless people pushing shopping carts under the highway bridges, where cardboard dwellings leaned against the steep banks of concrete and the sides of the ramps. I drove fast, turning left on a red. I turned on WDIZ. Bad Company. Again. All the words came back. I sang hard and loud and well, and I longed for a cigarette; I never smoked.
I got off on Fairbanks, then realized it was way too soon. It was easy to get lost in Orlando. It’s set slantwise, so north is east. I pulled into a Publix near the highway. Inside, I bought a Vogue and a four-pack of baby wine bottles. I drove the back streets in the general direction of my mother’s house. If I didn’t think about where I was going, I’d get there. If I started thinking, trying, I’d end up in Aloma, Bithlo, Narcoossee.
In my mom’s driveway, I leaned over the steering wheel, hooking my chin on it. Her house was pitch-dark. It looked vacant.
I opened one of the little screw-top wine bottles and sipped the greasy merlot. Each time I thought of Keith’s words, war zone and mental institution, I felt a pinch. I finished off the first bottle.
I knocked softly, then harder, on the front door. No lights came on and I didn’t hear a sound. Then the garage door churned upward halfway and I ducked under it, my suitcase banging my shins.
“You are in the nick of time,” my mother said, not unkindly.
“It’s so hot in here!” I said.
She darted into the kitchen. “It’s late October!” she yelled. “Okay to heat a home in winter, last time I checked!”
I went to the guest room. It was hot and stuffy, and the closed-room smell was overpowering. I’d never be able to sleep. I sat on the bed.
Against the wall, on the floor, were unframed oil portraits of my brother and me.
In my portrait—I was about five or six—I wore a silvery-white princess dress with a big blue silk sash. My brother was in a little blue jumpsuit. We looked well groomed and loved and suburban, almost rich, like children from a book. She had never framed them or hung them. They were propped here temporarily, for my visit, for my benefit. She knew I coveted them. She didn’t hang art on walls: she propped it on the floor and covered it with pillowcases. She didn’t like to ruin good plaster, she said.
I moved the portraits to the dresser, then closed the door and took off my pretty skirt. It was damp from the nervous sweat of a long day. I took off my strappy top and my excellent pink bra and my sexy agonizing sandals. I hid the remaining wine bottles in the drawer of the little dresser that nested between the beds. I pulled back the drapes. Bedsheets were tacked to the walls, covering the windows. I pushed them aside. I used some of the clothespins to hold back the fabric. I lifted the blinds. Dust flew like smoke. I sneezed and sneezed.
“Bless you, oh goodness, bless you! You okay in there, darling?” my mother called sweetly from just outside the door. “Are you hungry? Can I feed you? I have so much food! I was expecting to feed so many people, and now it’s just you!”
I pulled and pulled but the window wouldn’t open. I ran my hands around the sides, feeling for an obstruction. And then I saw. Little holes had been drilled into the metal frames and there were nails in each hole, securing the windows.
I pulled the nails out and opened the windows all the way. The air was jasmine and gardenias, that familiar perfume. I breathed in deep. I tried to remember. Had she always nailed the windows shut? Yes. It was just how we lived. Bare light-bulbs. Sponge baths in the garage. Walking around on our knees. Windows nailed shut.
Paranoid schizophrenic.
That could not be. Schizophrenics were like Dave’s first wife. They were locked away, they were on meds, they were crazy, crazy people. My mom was peculiar. It was not possible for me to be thirty-eight years old and not to have known my mother was a paranoid schizophrenic.
I lay back in the tepid bath. A black smear in the shape of a wolf’s head gloomed on the ceiling above the tub. The salts I’d chipped out of their ancient glass decanter lay on the surface of the water, chunky little islands floating around my body. I would look at the hot-water heater in the morning.
I closed my eyes and sank lower in the deep old tub. I wondered how you would know if someone was crazy. Not just peculiar, quirky, wacky, safety-conscious, different, but truly insane.
My mother screamed.
“Who did this? Who did this? Who opened this window? Who has been in here?” Her voice was coming closer.
I jumped out of the tub and wrapped myself in a towel and went into the hallway.
She had covered her face with her palms and she was looking at me through her fingers. I felt enormous, pink, and steamy.
“Who opened a window? Who did it?” She turned and faced the wall.
I had seen her like this before, many times. How had I forgotten? How had I brought Dave’s boys here? What had I been thinking? What had I been not thinking?
“I opened it,” I said. “I had to. I had to get air.” I followed her into the room. The window was shut tight, the air perfectly still.
“What in the name of heaven is going on in this room!” she cried. She put her hands to her throat. She was shaking, shivering. I realized I’d seen all this before.
“Mom,” I said, looking at her across the bedroom. She was plastered up against the wall, pressing her palms back into it. “Why are the windows nailed shut? What if there was a fire? I had to get out?”
She rolled her head around, as if my words were taxing every bit of patience she had left. “Heather, please, please put on some clothes. Common decency dictates. This is unreal. My God. My purse.” She left the room, closing the door firmly.
I crept out to the living room and called Dave. He was happy to hear my voice, I could tell. His voice beamed and ambled and embraced me. Had he been drinking? Too much?
“Dave,” I interrupted. “I have to ask you something and I just want you to tell me, okay? Simple and straightforward.”
“I’ll do my best, sweetheart.”
“If you just had one way to tell, how would you know if a person was crazy? What’s the one defining characteristic? How do you know?” I knew he would know.
Dave said there probably wasn’t one thing.
“But if there was.”
“Well, sweetheart . . .” He was talking too slowly. I got the sense he was holding back. He knew; why didn’t he want me to know?
“Just tell me.”
“They see things that aren’t there and hear things no one else hears.”
I felt immense relief. Keith was an idiot. I knew my mother. This was not her. I would ask her, and she would say of course she didn’t see things that weren’t there or hear things no one else heard. I said good-bye to Dave.
“Who was that you were talking to?” my mother said fiercely. We were in the hallway. For a tiny person she was taking up a lot of room, like a live downed wire. She put her arms around herself.
I knew what she’d say to this question. I knew, absolutely, she would say no. Did I even need to ask?
“Have you brushed your teeth? They are so important.”
“Mom,” I said. I was guessing she’d be too insulted to answer. Which would be a good kind of answer. I made myself say it, the question Dave had given me: “Have you ever seen anything that wasn’t there or heard voices or things other people don’t hear?”
Her hands flew to her mouth, as though I’d socked her there.
She said: “You just want to lock me up. I know you. That’s all you’ve ever wanted.”
She turned and ran down the hall and locked herself in her dark bedroom and I didn’t hear a sound.
Dave picked up on the second ring. I told him what she’d said. “It’s the wrong answer,” I said. “It’s the wrong answer.”
He said to get a hotel room. “You can’t stay there now.”
I packed and loaded the suitcase into the car and flew across Orlando.
Seven
I think everyone has one day like this, and some people have more than one. It’s the day of the accident, the midlife crisis, the breakdown, the meltdown, the walkout, the sellout, the giving up, giving away, or giving in. The day you stop drinking, or the day you start. The day you know things will never be the same again.
I’d left my mother a note on the kitchen table; I’d double-underlined I love you. I drew the little pig holding a balloon on a string that we always drew on our letters to each other. I drove toward the airport, stopping at my father’s house. His back door was wide open. I walked past Donny, sacked out in the same position he’d been in when I was here with the boys, which seemed, now, long ago. I passed the large framed portrait of my father in his silver Afro, centered on a black and red Indian rug. I walked past my old bedroom, where what sounded like the same porn movie bleated and hummed, a woman, or more than one, moaning uh uh uh from behind the closed door.
I found Fred in his wheelchair, smoking, at the edge of the swimming pool. It was four in the morning. I sat on the edge of a planter filled with sand and beer bottles and plastic plant baskets, frizzled with foliage long dead. I asked him straight-out: Was my mother mentally ill? Had she ever been?
“Hell, no,” he said. He was so close to the edge of the pool. Was his brake on?
“You can tell me,” I said.
“I can’t hear you,” he said.
“I wasn’t talking,” I said. “I’m waiting for you to tell me about Mom.”
“Wah no,” he said intently, frustrated. “I don’t. No, no, no.” He smelled of pee and gin and smoke.
“Whatever I say or anyone says, you say no. It’s a reflex.”
“No,” he said. “No.”
I laughed. He didn’t. Wasn’t he freezing out here in shorts? His skin was so thin. The pool smelled green. The thick water was low.
“Was there ever something wrong with Mom?” I paused. “She was never in an institution, ever?”
His expression didn’t change. Ash dropped on my inner arm, stung. I blew it off.
“Was there some kind of breakdown?” I wondered how much he knew. Did he know that after he left she couldn’t leave the house for months? I was eleven, my brother was nine, so Mom must have been forty-five years old, unemployed. Did he know she made us walk around on our knees? Did he know about the so-called safety drills? How to swim for the surface if Suzy went off a bridge. How to get out of the house in case of a fire. We’d roll around in blankets, then scuttle toward the front door, patting the walls, patting the doors before opening them. It was fun, we didn’t care. Anytime an adult got down on the floor to show you something, you got excited, you said “Yes, yes, yes.” We were small children. We were for fire, we were for apocalyptic afternoons. Now I stood, leaning over him, bent at the waist, hands on the wheels of the chair. We were right at the edge. “Dad. I have to know. Was Mom ever in a mental institution or diagnosed as mentally ill?”
“Aw, come on,” he said. “Shit.” He looked at me, confused, surprised, as though his feelings were hurt.
We were right at the edge. Wind rustled in the palm trees, and in the mercury vapor lights their bright orange nuts glowed like eyes. I’d forgotten that sound, that gentle scratching sound the fronds make that could drive you crazy.
“She’s not crazy,” he said. “Peculiar.” His eyes were blinking fast, fast, fast.
I palmed at the furnace of smoke between our faces. He had a cigarette between his fingers, another going in the ashtray on his thigh.
“Well, she nails her windows shut. Has she always done that?”
“No. Why?” he said, loud, flat, his eyes a blend of curiosity and irritation. “Wah.” He leaned forward. This was my father: leaning forward, drink in hand, wondering what, sure of himself, about to say no, annoyed for no reason at all and for every reason, leaning hard into his next chance to expound.
I pulled up an old plastic chair and perched on the edge of its damp seat. I got out my notebook. “What about when I was born? Was she okay after? Was she ever hospitalized?”
“No,” he said. “What for?”
“She was gone at least twice. I know she was gone. Because we stayed with the Hahns, those people you knew from work.”
“No,” Fred said. From inside, Donny’s snoring rolled out, like rocks tumbling downhill. “Him!” Fred yelled. “Him! Sleep! He sleeping for three days now.” He raised his arm and shook his fist into the sky.
“Rip Van Winkle,” I said. None of the Sellers brothers worked. They were dead or unemployed.
“Rip Van Winkle,” Fred said, nodding sagely. “He has to go. I want him out.”
“But Fred, you begged him to move in with you. Remember?”
Another eruption of nos. The lights in a window across the street flicked on.
I took his hand, caught his eyes with mine. “Did she really have leg surgeries? She was in the hospital. Remember?” I felt like a child impersonating a detective, a vague middle-aged version of Harriet the Spy. “What for—really?”
Fred’s mouth was open; he was staring at me, uncomprehending.
It came to me that she hadn’t kicked us out until after I’d told her the story of Dave’s wife. Was having him in her house—someone who knew mental illness—too risky? She’d been excited about us up until that moment. That’s when everything had changed.
Fred was crying now. My brother had been colicky and my mother had struggled with that, but that was all, he said. She was a good mother. She loved you.
“So, where would she go when she disappeared for days at a time? What was that about? Did she do that when y’all were first married?”
“Where would she go.” Fred laughed, but without smiling; it was more like coughs of resignation, micro-explosions of despair. He nodded at the glass. Refill this. I took the glass and held it in my hands. It was cold and hot. He said, “I was real disappointed you didn’t come with those boys last night. I had extra chairs brought down from the Moose. And a mess of smelt. I was waiting. Waiting for you. Waited up.” He underlined the words with his good hand, with the empty glass. He looked sincerely sad and he kept looking that way. It hurt under my ribs, in my muscles, in my lungs, to see that look on his face, his eyes, his forehead, everything dropped.
I told him I was sorry. “We had to see Mom,” I said. “Remember?”
“You did not. You did not. You did not say that. You did not.” He banged the flat of his hand on the armrest.
I went inside and pulled the jug of gin from the counter, where it sat with four brother bottles, the largest size, the kind with built-in glass handles, bottom-shelf. Donny erupted into a wheezefest and I startled, spilling.
I watched my father through the kitchen window as I washed my hands. His tiny bird legs, the yellow-gold hair flanging out and shimmering in the dawn light, his jaw shivering. He looked so lost and desperately in love with the world at once.
Back outside, I flew through more questions. What about covering up the television with blankets every night? Had she always done that? Was there mental illness in either family? What had her mother been like? What about her sister? I reminded him Aunt Katy would not leave her bedroom, then the house, the whole house. He didn’t know what I was talking about. She was peculiar, he kept saying, but she was a good person. “Sweet. Sweet person.”
“Fred,” I said. “Is there something about Mom you aren’t telling me? I’m begging.”
“Of course I am not telling you something,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. “I’m not telling you anything. If I told you something, I’d have to kill you. Classified!”
I laughed. He grinned wide; his giant, glorious teeth gleaming in the intense light that came from the kitchen. I saw he was crying, really crying.
I leaned forward and put my palms on his knees.
I breathed in the smoke.
“Fred!” I said. I slapped his knee. “Well, what? What is it?”
“She’s peculiar. I’ll grant you that.” He scooped his head in a giant nod. “The rest? Not telling.” He shut his lips tight, pulled them into his mouth.
I paused at the gate to the pool. He looked so bad. I said, “Just tell me what you know. What can it hurt? What’s the big secret about Mom?”
My father closed his eyes. “To my grave,” he said. He put his hand on his heart. With the cigarette.
I slung my purse on my shoulder and got my car keys out. “What if my plane goes down? What if something happens between now and when you will tell me?”
He winced and swallowed, and then he swallowed some more. He looked at me—right into me. He blinked his giant black liquid eyes. He said, “Then you will die a peaceful sleep.”
I turned in the rental car, then ran for the terminal.
I smelled like my father, coated with cigarette smoke and gin fumes. I moved as one moves in a nightmare, running but not getting anywhere. My legs weren’t working in sync with real time or with each other. I lurched past the gates, my bag banging my calves, my shins, my ankles.
No one was at check-in at C47. The waiting area was empty. The doors were closed. Did I have the wrong date? The wrong gate? Was I in the wrong terminal altogether? I double-checked the gate. Then I read the marquee message as it bannered by. Gate change Grand Rapids gate change. A12. And a delay.
The closer I got to A12, the more my mother began to seem like Mom again, and the madder I got at Keith Landreu. She was not insane. She was difficult, quirky, kind, mysterious, eccentric, “peculiar.” If my mother was a paranoid schizophrenic, Fred would have known. I would have known. Someone would have noticed and said something. Relatives would have taken my brother and me and raised us. (I’d always wanted my aunt Adele, a gorgeous redhead with a yellow convertible, to do this very thing.) Authorities would have intervened. There would have been doctors, medication, checkups, social services, tons of evidence. It would have been impossible for her to get away with paranoid schizophrenia; it wasn’t a very subtle illness. Was it? You couldn’t be a paranoid schizophrenic and raise two kids and keep it a secret. It wasn’t like low blood sugar.
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