Dave explained two things to me: portals and tampering. His understanding was that schizophrenics couldn’t tolerate anything that was a conduit for the voices and the visions. The voices and visions tended to come in through framed things: a window or anything that was a kind of window; mirrors, photographs, paintings. Anything that emitted energy: radio, television, telephones. Sex was a portal. Death was a portal.
This could explain why my mother devised elaborate schemes for me to call home. Let it ring once, then call back, let it ring twice. Why she refused to go to her mother’s funeral, sleep with my father, get a microwave, go to restaurants, go to weddings. Church. Church was one giant portal. “It’s just too alive,” Dave said. Statues, crowds, tombstones. Too much energy. Too much comes through.
Schizophrenics, he said, always had a reason for what they did. To us, their actions looked crazy, but if you took the time to piece it together, to go through the steps they went through, you could see they had a well-thought-out plan. The goal itself would likely never make sense to us, but the steps they were taking were the right ones to get them down that particular path.
Tampering was another schizophrenic safety cap. Tedious food rituals, the ban on restaurants, hiding food in closets. Not going to other people’s houses or having people come over. Dave explained they didn’t do these things to be difficult or weird. They had to do them. It was all for our safety. Other mothers would be careless, uninformed. They would bring food in from unchecked sources. They wouldn’t lock doors, they would leave windows open: all manner of difficulty and threat would be running rampant through these homes. My mother took her mothering seriously; she did not want harm to come to us. She was trying to keep us alive.
“I don’t know if it’s insanity, really,” Dave said. “It’s just a real different world from our world.”
When I was ten, Fred purchased a beautiful painting at the Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival and hung it in our living room. My mother hated it. Too black, she said. I loved it, this beautiful abstract painting with a black background, subtle wisps of white that were to me cars and commuters and clouds, the energy of a good city, moving quickly. And buildings, black on black. There were pieces of red too. I visited the red places, splotches (planets) and streaks (bad moods, crime, be careful) and lines (open all night, go, go faster). I could stare at that painting for an entire afternoon; it was like reading a novel.
My mother said the black, the red, did not fit in with her décor at all. She was Early American. We had a table from Ethan Allen. She hated the painting. She hated that my father spent money on it. She hated that she wasn’t consulted. She hated contemporary. She hated art on the walls. She hated anything on any wall anywhere. First she draped the painting with a sheet. Then she took the painting down. She bought a tube of yellow ochre oil paint and slowly, over a period of weeks, she changed the red parts to mustard. Then she started covering all the black, the ground, leaving jagged islands around the white wisps. She ended up painting the entire canvas yellow ochre. It took three tubes. I was beside myself. It was as though she’d painted over a living person. And for her, I now realized, it was just like that. The painting was too alive for her.
Dave was the only sane person I ever met who understood mental illness from the point of view of the mentally ill.
Because of his marriage, he’d been forced to pitch a tent in the land of the insane. He’d camped there, he’d passed through, he understood the culture. I’d been born inside those borders, deep in that country, but I did not belong there. Of course, I didn’t know this then; I didn’t know there were other lands. Paranoid schizophrenia wasn’t my address, but for a long time it was where the mail came.
When Dave came to visit me for Valentine’s Day, we went to Ottawa, stayed at the Château Laurier, took photos of ourselves eating breakfast, swimming. We made plans to get married as soon as possible: that April, on the boys’ spring break.
I called my mother, the first time we’d spoken since Orlando. I told her Dave and I had very happy news: we wanted to invite her to our wedding.
There was a long silence. She took a deep breath. “I can’t even believe you are considering this. When I think back to what went on in this house—oh my gosh in heaven, I am getting upset now. Heather. I’m getting very upset!” I tried to understand what she’d just said.
“Please don’t be upset,” I repeated gently. After this long spell of thinking about my mother as someone who suffered from schizophrenia, and keeping in mind all that I understood about the disease, I knew that my news was less likely to provoke a tender mother-daughter moment than a dangerous schism that would make us even more distant. Still, I needed to be the daughter who invited her mother to her wedding, and part of me had believed she would come. It was my wedding.
“No,” she said. “I am upset. There’s more. As long as we are talking.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I want the money you owe me back as well. I hate to bring that up. I know Dave is only hourly and deep in debt because he had all those medical bills from that other person. But I really do have to ask. It’s time. Way overdue time, in point of fact.”
“Mom,” I said. I told her there was no money; I didn’t owe her any money.
“Heather,” she said. “I will always love you, but the damage you’ve done is irreparable. You’ve taken so much. These things add up. I think I have reached my limit with you.”
I told her I understood. And I did.
She was pulling back, to preserve herself. She had to bring out the big guns. I was going into someone else’s house and not coming back out. A wedding invitation wasn’t what she had been waiting for. It was what she had been dreading. Me, out in the world: it wasn’t safe—for me or for her.
I could be kind to her, but I was done colluding.
I was starting a new life.
Dave and the boys drove out in the van. The town was covered with snow. I pinned two-dollar carnation boutonnieres on David Junior and Jacob, and we got married at the courthouse, in a tiny dank paneled basement room. The orange curtains on the little casement windows were askew; they reminded me of the curtains in my father’s house. The women from my running group were there, in their running clothes and headbands—hard to tell apart. I wore sandals and, over my thin white dress, a coat. The judge, a runner, said, “For better or worse, for faster or slower,” and Dave cried and I cried and the boys looked hot and uncomfortable and pleased to be on their spring break, but not pleased to be in a tiny courthouse basement in a forsaken town on the St. Lawrence Seaway. Then we went across the street and got bagels. It seemed perfect to me.
Three
My sophomore year of high school, Fred allowed two drifters to move in with us, in the house he’d bought on Gondola, out by the airport. It had three bedrooms and a funny little swimming pool in the front yard. He was working at Martin Marietta—as a tax advisor, he said—but he was often home at three in the afternoon. Then, after dinner, he’d take off and be gone all night. I’d been living with him off and on.
The men had tried to come in my bedroom at night. They stole my jewelry, my cash. I had to put my dresser in front of the door and hide in there. I said he had to make a choice, them or me.
He said there was no reason not to be nice to his friends, no reason at all. He said, “You’re turning into your mother.”
So it was back to my mother’s. She said this was it. No more back-and-forth. She forbade me to talk to Keith Landreu on the telephone, but I talked to him every day after school, for hours and hours. She forbade me to see him, but he snuck into our house in the afternoons while she was out job-hunting, and I snuck into his house at night. Then came the day he walked past me at school, his lips tightly pressed together, and looked right through me. I froze in the flow of kids; I couldn’t believe that look on his face: closed, over, done, stay away. Just the day before, we’d been naming our children and decorating our apartment in London. I wanted to be dead. For days
, I couldn’t stop crying.
I missed my father’s cooking. I missed the little pool in the front yard. I called him after school and started going there for dinner again. As soon as the drifters moved on, I moved back in.
One afternoon a white Cadillac nosed into the driveway, slowly, like it was being filmed. An arm came out the window, waved, and a woman poked her head out. “I have heard sooo much about you, Heather,” she said, smiling at me so hard it hurt to look at her. “Oh Lordy, I am so happy to finally, finally meet you!” She had a little feathery cap of black hair. She popped out of her giant sleek car, leaving the engine running. She came over in her high-heel black patent leather strappy sandals and hugged me hard and long. “I’ve got some things for you. Look at you! You are so beautiful! And I’ve heard how smart you are. Your daddy worships you.” She took me by the shoulders and looked deep into my eyes. “You don’t have to like me,” she said. “Just don’t be overtly evil and we’re going to be fine, deal? Oh, I just want to visit! You are so damn dear.” I didn’t want to but I laughed, a burst of relief coming out of me against my will.
“Okay, all right, then, let’s get this stuff inside. I never know what your daddy is going to have over here and what he isn’t gonna have, but that’s okay! I bring what I need!” She was rooting around in her backseat. Her car stereo was playing John Denver. She turned, holding a basket, and set it on the hood and came over and hugged me again. “I’m going to fall in love with ya! I know I am!” Her boobs pressed into me. Her perfume was something famous. She handed me a present, wrapped.
“Is this for Fred?” I said. But really, I knew who it was for. I knew I was going to love whatever it was. I was thinking already what it would be like if I lived in her house. If she and Fred got married.
“Oh, we’re gonna have so much fuuuuuuun,” she said. She clicked off her car at last, tossed her keys into her purse, slung it over her shoulder, and said, “Okay! Look at you! Just look at you now! I bet the boys are going wild. I love your eye shadow. You look just like your mom, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. I couldn’t see that I looked like anyone in my family. “Fred hates it,” I said. “He calls it goop.”
“We love goop,” she said. “We can’t help it, can we, now? Can we help we love goop and pretties?” And she skittered into the house, calling my father’s name. I didn’t even know I loved goop. I did, though. So much.
Ruby Redding was gorgeous and kind. She had giant breasts that shot straight out of her chest, high and pointed—the Grand Tetons, my new boyfriend, Wayne, called them. She had a flat stomach, thin hips, and a wardrobe of shiny high heels—black, silver, white, gold, bronze, hot pink. She wore either black straight-leg pants or fuchsia straight-leg pants, with bright flowered low-cut silky tops. She wore bright shiny beaded necklaces, at least three or four. Always, she wore her gold necklace, which was a mounded hunk of gold—her “nugget,” she called it: it was all of her ex-husband’s gifts melted down. He was a bastard. But Ruby had taken her bad old days, she said, and made them into something she really loved. That could be a good thing for me to know, she said. That bad can be converted into something really beautiful. “All that pain was worth a thing or two.”
“Worth a thing or two,” Fred said, laughing in a mocking way, questioning her with his eyebrows. “That makes no sense.”
Ruby taught me to two-step, make tender biscuits, play cards, curl my hair, and give myself a pedicure. She brought me pretty new blouses that I never wore: they were too slippery, too secretary. She brought me her old maxi dresses and high heels and her old beaded necklaces from the fifties, which I wore all the time, with shorts and tank tops, with sundresses, with my bathing suits. I twisted them around my ankles and hooked them into my hair. In Ruby’s things, and a pair of sunglasses, I felt like a movie star, and would whisper in the mirror, You look like a million bucks, winking and setting my jaw. She handed me her daughter’s old hippie caftans, ironed, and told me my daddy was the best thing that had ever happened to her, if only he didn’t drink so much, if only he wasn’t married. For a long time, I thought she meant to my mother. It was from Ruby I learned my father truly had divorced my mother and had married another woman, Bella, who’d been in the circus and had a fat and unfortunate son. She said the reason women liked my dad so much was that he talked. There were two kinds of men: Strong silent types were common and were silent because they had nothing to say. Talking men, on the other hand, were fun: they loved women, dancing, having fun, cooking, snuggling, and this is the kind of man you wanted.
I gave Fred over to Ruby. Because she loved him so much, I could relax, I found some space, I was no longer crucial to his very survival. In this space, I found I could despise him, his habits. At the same time, I found I could love him. This kind and easy woman made him safe, less strange and dangerous. And those dresses in the closet: how easy it was to pretend they were hers.
Ruby and I had our best talks while we did the dishes. “Now, I know your daddy thinks you just need to stay here, live with him, take care of him, but don’t you worry about that, Heather, you need to go to college. Don’t you ever tell him I said this to you. He would kill me dead. You’re the light of his life, but you have to stretch your wings. I want that for you. I want it so much.”
She said she’d take care of ol’ Freddy the Frog. I should focus on my life, and live it. “This is your turn! This is your whole life ahead of you!” College was where I would find a good man to marry. Not Wayne. Don’t marry that boy, she said.
Wayne was acquired soon after Keith Landreu ceased acknowledging my existence.
Wayne wore floral bell-bottoms, dashikis, and beaded head-bands. He was famous at school because his mother had given birth to him when she was sixteen years old and he had a bizarre medical condition that was causing him to go bald and grow a thick, wiry red beard.
Wayne just gave me rides, I told Ruby. “He gives you a lot more than rides, honey,” she declaimed. “I just don’t think he is on par with you. I don’t think he’s your caliber. I hate a man who honks his horn for a woman. He should be coming to the door.”
Wayne refused to come to the front door to get me. He thought Fred was a drunk who harassed me, who was weak. Wayne idled in the driveway and peeled out every time he picked me up, laying rubber up and down our street. My father hated him.
Ruby shook her little cap of black feathered hair. She wasn’t kidding. She wanted me to hold out for the very best. “You’ve got something special in you, Heather,” she said, and the way she said it, I almost believed her. She’d tear up, and then I would too. Then Fred would barge in and say it was time for inspection, and things would click back to crazy-normal, just like her words had never been spoken.
Many nights my mother came down there and parked in the driveway, taking notes on our comings and goings in a little spiral notebook. It was hard to concentrate with her out there; sometimes Fred would go yell at her. Sometimes I went out and sat in the truck with her. She would talk about how much she loved Fred, how horrible a mother she was, how badly she wanted to get us all back together. If she could undo her mistakes. If I could undo mine. She went on and on about what she believed I’d done. All my lovers. The money I had stolen. How I had driven the family apart, brought us irreparable harm. I knew I hadn’t done anything, but I felt guilty anyway. I told her she was a good mother. I told her that living with Fred wasn’t easy and that I missed her, wished I could be with her. She didn’t think we should say anything negative about my father. He was a brilliant, brilliant man. The smartest man she’d ever met. He loved us. No, the problem was her. And her problem was me.
One night the four of us were playing hearts, Fred and Wayne and Ruby and me. Fred and Wayne were laughing together, like old pals. I had won the last two hands but couldn’t shoot the moon.
“Hold your cards, I can see everything,” Wayne said. “You’da got shot by now if this were a real game.”
Fred liked this talk; he banged
on the table, yeah yeah yeah.
“It’s your turn. Go!” I said. He blew smoke in my face and that’s when I heard the front door creak open. “Is someone in the house?” I said.
“I’m concen-mo-trating here,” Fred said. He whacked the back of his hand toward me, staring hard at his cards.
Ruby called out, “Hello, hello, hello!” and she and Wayne and I all looked at each other across the table.
I got up from the table and went into the kitchen.
“Mom,” I whispered. Her hair was in a kerchief and she had on her winter coat, though it was hot enough for shorts and bare feet. She was rooting through Ruby’s purse, a white leather handbag perched on top of the dishwasher.
“Who dat?” Fred hollered.
“Your turn, dude,” I heard Wayne say.
“Heather?” Ruby called.
I grabbed my mother’s shoulders. I whispered, hard, “You can’t go through people’s purses!” This wasn’t the first time this had happened. My mother had snuck in before, taken other women’s purses. I had looked the other way, happy that my mother was causing problems for my father’s livestock. “Quit messing with my stable,” he would say to my mother. He had threatened to call the police on her. “Go right ahead! Go right ahead, buster!” she’d fire back.
I tried to take Ruby’s purse from her, but she pulled it to her chest like a football.
Fred and Ruby and Wayne came into the kitchen.
“Oh my gosh in heaven,” my mother said.
Ruby said, “Is that my bag, hon?” She took a step forward.
“Don’t push me, don’t push me,” my mother said, sidling out the door.
Fred was banging on the counter with both hands, laughing. “Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, hold on, now. Hold on,” he gasped.
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