Don't Go Crazy Without Me

by Deborah A. Lott

  “Grandma scared me,” I said to my father.

  “What, did she hit you?” Before her visit was over, Rebecca would slap me across the face, chase me into bed, and put me across her lap and give me an enema when I couldn’t get hard stool out of my rectum. For the latter act, I would be grateful. As of that moment, she had only harangued me in Yiddish.

  “The mirrors,” I said. “Why did she do that to the mirrors?”

  “It’s part of Shiva. When someone dies, you cover up the mirrors, and take off your shoes, sit on a low bench, and wear black. A man doesn’t shave. A minyan of thirteen men gathers to say Kaddish.”

  “Why can’t I look in the mirror?” I said.

  “When someone dies, you turn away from your outward appearance, and turn your attention inward.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “It scares me.”

  In preparation for my mother’s return and the week’s Shiva, my father took me with him to the market, where we bought silver foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses.

  “These are what people brought over after my zayde passed away,” he said. “I remember so vividly the afternoon he died, hovering outside the room in our house where people from the shul sat with him. I kept staring at the crack under the door, thinking that if I just kept watching, I’d see the Malech-Hamovess, the Angel of Death, slip out under the door and carry away his soul.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Nothing. Not so much as a shadow. I wanted some sign so I could keep on believing. I was so angry at God. Then people brought us Hershey’s chocolates. You have to understand, Rebecca would never bring candy into the house. She caught me gorging myself on the chocolate. ‘How can you enjoy yourself?’ she said. ‘Chocolate! Feh!’ She made me feel guilty because if my grandfather hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have gotten the chocolate, and I loved the chocolate so that must mean I was happy he had died. ‘If you’d really loved him as much as you say, you wouldn’t be able to indulge yourself; you wouldn’t even want to eat chocolate; you wouldn’t even want to look at chocolate,’ she said. I felt terrible. She took away the only small consolation I had.” I patted my father on the arm. He continued. “Rebecca was wrong. It’s only human to crave a sweet taste in your mouth when you’re sad. It’s okay to feel two things at the same time. You never have to feel bad just for being human.”

  I understand my grandmother’s ritual with the mirrors differently now. The Malech-Hamovess that my father failed to see lurked all around us. It had destabilized the energy fields, opened the portals between the living and the dead. We had to cover the mirrors; otherwise my grandmother’s death could take advantage of our vain desires and pull in others after her, through the permeable membranes of our own reflections.

  While Rebecca readied the house for my mother to sit Shiva, Paul and I spent a lot of time outdoors. For my birthday that year, my mother had given me a play oven that I kept on the concrete wall in the lower portion of our yard. “Try to guess what it is,” my mother had said, when she presented me with the square package. “I’ll give you a hint: it has buttons.”

  “Is it a dress?” I asked. “A sweater? A coat? A blouse?”

  “No,” she said, “it’s not clothing, but it has buttons.” The only objects I knew of with buttons were clothes. I’d asked for a stove, but I knew it couldn’t be a stove because stoves had knobs, not buttons. The stove I wanted could not have fit in that little box. It was nearly life size and pink, like the one I’d seen in the toy section of the Sears catalog. A stove that looked like the one Miss Frances cooked in on television. I opened the package.

  “See,” she said, “buttons,” pointing to green, yellow, and red buttons that pushed in and out without effect. I felt duped. This was so much less than I’d asked for. Another of my mother’s disappointing gifts: scratchy blouses and sweaters in neutral colors, textures utilitarian and serviceable. I preferred the fluffy, shiny dresses with oversized bows that my father gave me. And the bounty of stuffies he brought home on my slightest prompting: poodles, tigers, teddy bears, lions, zebras. He was still trying to make it up to me for Jo Jo, the stuffed monkey that I took with me everywhere until I made the mistake one day of letting him fall from the car seat into the gutter.

  “There’s pigeon dreck there,” my father shouted, instructing Ben to remove Jo Jo from my sight as I screamed. He put him in the trunk. Later that night, my mother held him up for a moment so I could say goodbye, and then he disappeared from my life. Afterward, I kept trying to remember his face. I keep trying still.

  The other animals were small solace but I loved them nevertheless and never took them out of the house where they might meet Jo Jo’s fate.

  My mother’s oven was too small to put real pots and pans in. But in her absence, the toy stove was all I wanted to play with.

  I made mud pies—the mud was chocolate; the sprinkle of sand on top was sugar.

  “Want a bite?” I said to Paul. He pretended to eat it.

  I repeated my mother’s final act before she left us, pulling the oven door open, closing it shut, opening it again. The pie went in; the pie came out. My mother would return.

  Ben created his own new ritual. We found his ordinary daily ablutions entertaining enough: he’d come home on the bus from high school in Glendale and go into the bathroom, scrub his face with Phisohex to ward off the acne, then brush his teeth and gargle. Gargle and gargle and gargle.

  “As long as he kissed a girl for—that’s how long he has to gargle,” Paul said. “He’s trying to get her germs out of his mouth.”

  Now Paul and I watched wide-eyed from the hallway outside the boys’ bedroom as Ben performed this new mysterious act. After he came out of the bathroom, he stood on the threshold of the boys’ bedroom with his hand towel draped over his arm. He muttered to himself and then walked methodically forward a few inches. He lingered there, deliberating, and then flung his towel purposefully onto his bed. Then he went over to the bed, picked up the towel, backed up into the hallway, stood at the same spot outside his bedroom, and threw the towel again.

  Paul and I looked at each other, trying to figure out the rules. A certain number of steps from the bathroom to the hallway, from the hallway into the doorway, a position that his feet had to line up in at the threshold of the room, a particular spot on the bedspread the towel had to hit?

  “What are you doing, Ben?” Paul asked. Teasing. “We can play too if you tell us the rules.”

  “Leave me alone,” he said.

  “Debbie and I are just trying to figure out what you’re doing.”

  “Mind your own beeswax,” Ben bellowed.

  My mother came home two days later with a cowgirl outfit for me. On the skirt, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans stood and smiled as Roy’s horse Trigger reared up powerfully behind them. I put on the skirt, along with the vest with studs and fringes, and the green and brown plaid flannel shirt, and abandoned my pie baking to play cowgirl. My mother removed the cloths from the mirrors. I stood back, aiming my black plastic gun at my own reflection in the mirror. I would be fierce.

  In the days that followed I watched for clues. Eva was no longer the mother she’d become the day she received the bad news, but she was not the mother she’d been the day before that either.

  Paul tattled on Ben about the towel-throwing ritual. My parents went into the boys’ room and sat down with Ben while Paul and I stood right outside the room. Ben confessed that if the towel had not hit the bed right, my mother’s plane would have crashed.

  “How you throw a towel has nothing to do with a plane,” my mother said.

  “You’re trying to control things that human beings have no control over,” my father agreed.

  It was one of the few times I saw them come together and concur on a matter of child rearing.

  “There’s been too much of Rebecca’s superstition in our house,” my mother said. Ben sobbed, no longer enslaved by the compunction to throw the towel.

  Over the next week, my
mother sat Shiva. We borrowed the metal folding chairs from the Jewish Center and lined them up in our dining room, pushed our dining room table up against the wall. Hives of chattering women invaded our kitchen. The smell of their clashing perfumes made me sneeze.

  I worried about who the bad habit might kill next, but that did not stop me from doing it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Kindergarten Papers

  Imade a name for myself in kindergarten by crying the entire first day. While the other children stood up together for the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, I pledged my allegiance to my mother by refusing to let go. When I would not stop crying, the teacher, Mrs. Bell, old and gnarled and severe, her skin and stiff hair both bluish gray, segregated me from the rest of the class in a chair by the window. “If you won’t stop crying, you can just sit here all by yourself,” she said.

  In fact, I wasn’t strictly alone. From the chair I could see my mother—or more precisely—my mother’s car. Eva sat out in front of the school in our blue Desoto for the duration of that first day because she had promised to, and feared that otherwise I might go “berserk.”

  My mother’s almost-presence, her being so near and yet out of reach, invisibly hidden inside the car, only increased the intensity of my grief. If I cried loud enough, I wondered, would she hear me? Would she know I had refused to let her go? Would she recognize it as proof of my love? I kept up a steady, nearly unbroken stream of my torment, my cries a string connecting us whether my mother could hear me or not.

  At first, I was among a small chorus of kindergarten criers. Ultimately, the other children proved pushovers. Tom with the bristle brush haircut held out the longest. Cagey Mrs. Bell knelt down beside Tom and in a sing-songy voice that barely masked her impatience, told him everything his mother would be doing while he was in school.

  “She’ll go to the store and buy food for you and Daddy,” she said. “She’ll clean and dust and vacuum the house, and then she will pick her big boy up and will be so proud of him for not crying, and you and Mommy will go home together and wait for Daddy to come home from work. Won’t that be nice?”

  Tom whimpered two final, tiny whimpers, wiped his eyes with his fists, and was vanquished.

  I couldn’t place myself in Mrs. Bell’s wholesome tableau. If Eva had not been sitting out in the car, she would not have been cheerfully cleaning house or shopping for dinner. She would have been in the office tending to my father. While I cried, I imagined the scene: all three phones ringing at once. Ira half-dressed in suit pants and a white V-necked t-shirt with one suspender falling over a shoulder, paced the office floor. Barefoot, twisting a strand of his curly black hair, he answered one phone and spoke jovially to a customer, while my mother held out the receiver of another. My parents mimed frantically to each other; she passed him a note; he wrote a furious note back.

  If I were not being held prisoner in kindergarten, I would have been in the middle of it, “under foot,” as my mother called it, making impromptu beds for my dolls in the drawers of my father’s desk. I lay the doll in gently over a stack of phone books, covered her with a towel-blanket, and shut the drawer. My father, needing the phone book, flung the doll and its blanket across the room. I retrieved her, waited until he had moved on, and restored the doll to her rightful chamber.

  “Debbie, please go in the other room and play or listen to records,” my mother would say. Jerry Lewis singing “Never Smile at a Crocodile” from the Disney cartoon “Peter Pan” was one of my favorites. I spent a lot of time in the bedroom alone, plotting plays in which my stuffies starred, and in which they all, from pandas to poodles, struggled to get along.

  While I sat in the chair in kindergarten and cried, I kept reliving the moment of separation: me clutching at a fold of my mother’s taupe wool coat, burying my face and sobbing into its downy surface, angry at the affront of being parted. The harder I clung, the more my mother stiffened and withdrew.

  “Stop it, you’re making a scene,” she said.

  For one sweet moment, when Mrs. Bell was out of earshot, she stroked my head and said, “Oh cookie, shush,” softening her body against me, a small concession to solace. I wanted that moment to go on forever; hearing her call me cookie was the best thing, the only thing in the world that mattered. More cookie, more cookie, more hugging, I thought. But my mother was shamed by the rawness of my desire for her, the voltage of my longing.

  My mother’s absence bore a hole through me—there was no me without her—nothing but what was missing. After a few minutes, the pain lessened a bit, but I made a decision to keep crying. To stop was to give in. If I acceded to the separation, my loss would become absolute. The only way I could hang on to any piece of my mother was to not let go, and to not let go was to keep on crying.

  So I sat in my chair by the window for the remainder of the day. When the sobbing exhausted me, I kept my spirits up by whimpering, howling, hyperventilating, and making little animal sounds in the back of my throat. Mrs. Bell alternated between glaring at me and pretending I wasn’t there. When the other children looked at me with pity, she instructed them, “Just ignore the little crybaby.” They did not stop looking, but curiosity and compassion devolved into smug superiority.

  The last half-hour of the day, Mrs. Bell told a story by moving figures on a felt board. The story lured, promised escape from the unresolvable tension between where I was, and my mother’s car, where I longed to be. Sammy, the seal, became separated from his family in the ocean but he recovered by joining the circus and becoming a star. Sammy balanced a ball on his nose, flapped his flippers on demand, and barked. The trainer rewarded him with sardines. The story held out a promise of independence. I could be like Sammy the seal; I could leave my mother and join the circus and be a star, too. But to commit to Mrs. Bell’s story felt like a form of giving in, so I gave up the story because I could not listen and cry at the same time.

  When class was over and I was finally freed to return to the sanctity of our blue Desoto, I stopped crying. On the way to my mother, and then once I had seen her face, I felt relief and the inklings of happiness. Yes, this was what I wanted, this was exactly who I needed. “I cried all day,” I told her. “I couldn’t stop crying for you.” My behavior had shown a certain resolve and tenacity, I figured.

  “Oooh,” she said, laughing. “You silly, silly girl. I bet none of the other children cried like that.”

  She hugged me, but the fervor of my passion was not met by equal fervor on her part. Shame washed over me. And in the midst of hugging her, I was still longing. Longing as she held me. Longing as I looked beyond her for that other perfect mother, the mother who loved me the way I loved her, the mother she became as soon as we were separated.

  After a while my mother stopped walking me all the way into the classroom and said goodbye at the front gate. She kept trying to wean me, coaxing me to say goodbye and let go of her sooner, as if there were some virtue I could not perceive in my needing her less, in increasing the distance between us.

  Dusk. I was in the front yard, playing one afternoon after I’d come home from kindergarten, when I nearly tripped over something. At my feet, at the base of one of the tall cypress trees that flanked our house, lay a broken nest.

  Bending down to examine it, I saw four baby birds inside. These were not the cute birds of my children’s books, not the fluffy chicks of Easter baskets. These didn’t look like any birds I’d ever seen. Bony bodies naked, their feathers not having come in yet, they trembled, shivering all over. Their dark eyes bulged, and I could see the blood pulsing blue in the vessels of their chests, in their throats, throbbing up in their bald heads. Their mouths were wide open, open so far that looking into them was like looking into the pink-lined flesh of an open cut. Like the cuts on my arm or knee that my father doused with Merthiolate while I sat on the bathroom counter and screamed. “Bactine isn’t strong enough.” Ira explained. “It has to hurt to kill the germs.” My father was hurting me to save me, and if I screamed
loud enough I would probably get another stuffed animal later.

  Nothing I’d seen had ever looked quite this exposed and been alive. I wanted to throw a blanket over them. If I hadn’t looked down, I might have missed them, might have kicked the nest out of my path or stomped on their heads without even knowing it. These birds were so small I could almost not see them, their cries so weak I could almost not hear them. But once I had heard them, their cries became the worst part—high-pitched, plaintive chirps; signals of distress. As I bent down, I understood exactly what they were pleading for. It was the same way I had cried for my mother the whole first day of kindergarten.

  Trying to override my own panic—a mixture of exhilaration, shock, disgust, and compassion—I improvised a plan for their rescue. My mommy will make them a new nest, I thought, a nest of soft cotton. She will protect them, take care of them, keep them warm. She will let me feed them; we will feed them together. We have to feed them right now, I thought. We have to do something to get that chirping to stop, to get those raw, open wounds of their mouths to close. My mommy will be their mommy, I thought; together we will take care of them until their own mother comes back.

  I raced into the house so excited I could barely get the words out: “Mommy, mommy, there’s baby birds that fell on the ground,” I said. “And they are crying, and the mother is gone, and they are so hungry.” Her head was in the oven, as she stirred stew in her blue speckled cast iron roasting pan.

  “I’m trying to get dinner ready now,” she said, “before your father gets over-hungry.” When my father got “over-hungry” he exploded. The worst fights always happened around the dinner table, where everyone was captive to the appetites that brought them.

  “Go and get Daddy,” she said.

  I found my father on the bed, dozing in his undershirt with his gray suit pants unbuttoned. He snored and a dark shadow of stubble covered his round face. “There’s baby birds outside,” I said, jostling his fat upper arm. “Get up, come on, come see them.” He finally stirred, looked confused, then took a long minute to raise his mass from the bed. He put his white dress shirt back on over his undershirt and a long black overcoat over that, and his scarf, and his shoes. All the time, I was at his side, trying to hurry him along.