Don't Go Crazy Without Me

by Deborah A. Lott

  She squirmed slightly and threw her arm over her eyes. She had learned to sleep defensively, guarding her rest against my father’s nighttime escapades.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I can’t stop crying; I can’t stop crying for Bobby.”

  I was wishing that, given the extreme events of the past few months—Bobby dead and my father disappearing—the rigid rules of our exchanges could be relaxed. If only she could beckon me to lie down beside her; that was the invitation I’d been waiting for all my life. Not just concede to giving me affection for my sake, not just allowing me to hug her, but relishing it. Hugging me back without reluctance. She didn’t have to cry for Bobby, though she had supported him too, she could have cried for my father, she could have cried for the jeopardy the business was in, she could have cried for the way her life had gone; it didn’t matter to me what she cried over, only that she cried with me.

  But that behavior would not have been in my mother’s nature. She had steeled herself for the months that lay ahead. She apparently had begun to guard herself against feeling early in her life and could not change now.

  “Mommy,” I whimpered. If the invitation did not come that night, it would never come.

  Clinging to her grogginess, my mother did not sit up or even open her eyes. She did not want to wake up. She did not want to have to deal with me. She probably regarded my crying and my appeal to her as manifestations of my self-dramatizing histrionics. Of his histrionics passed down to me. After all, I didn’t know Bobby personally. I’d only worked in the campaign for a few weeks. In her mind, this was adolescent self-indulgence.

  “You’ve got to get a hold of yourself,” she said. My mother had gotten an iron hold of herself in the days since she’d institutionalized my father and was suggesting I do the same. Get a hold of yourself was her usual advice, and she had a point when I was acting crazy, but this didn’t feel crazy. Crying wasn’t crazy. Sorrow and grief weren’t crazy. In fact, expressing this deep emotion made me feel saner than I’d felt for months. I wasn’t notting or obsessing or deducing strange connections between unrelated things. I wasn’t trying to control an uncontrollable universe. I wasn’t hanging on to what could not be held onto. I was grieving someone I’d allowed myself to love. And I was trying to learn how to let go.

  I would cry all night if I wanted to. I would cry for as long as it took. This wasn’t crazy. This was normal. All I’d come to her for was some reassurance of that fact, and a small modicum of comfort.

  “I don’t know how to get a hold of myself,” I said.

  I’d seen all those grown-ups cry at the Ambassador and there was nothing wrong with them. I’d seen them put their arms around one another and cry together. I’d seen Bobby cry for his own brother at JFK’s funeral, and cry in the streets of Atlanta when Martin Luther King was gunned down. “Tell me what to do,” I sobbed, but even as I asked, I’d already moved past the question.

  I’ll never be like you, I was thinking. I’ll never be more like you and less like my father. But that doesn’t mean I have to be crazy like him. Though I couldn’t have articulated it, that night I began to make my way to a decision. If I had to choose between feeling—between naked expression of emotion—and being remote, locked in, exerting a murderous hold on myself and my feelings, I would choose feeling. But feeling didn’t have to mean my father’s version of feeling. Emotion and hysteria might not be the same thing. Could it be that hysteria, even though it might have the appearance of feeling, was really a way to avoid feeling?

  In the whole period of my father’s decline, I’d never cried the way I cried that night for Bobby. I couldn’t cry when my grandmother died and was afraid to cry when my father wailed and sobbed so many times right in front of me. I’d felt like I had to keep my wits about me when he pleaded with me to call the FBI and help him convince them of my mother and uncle’s diabolical plot. I had swallowed my tears when I’d visited him in the mental hospital the night of the assassination.

  I cried for Bobby in a way I could not cry for my father. Perhaps what moved me the most was what Bobby had done with his own brother’s death. He had not folded up into himself as my father had when his mother died; he had not collapsed and left his children to fend for themselves while he regressed. Instead, grief had washed him clean, opened him up, purified him to feel more deeply the pain of others. He’d quoted Aeschylus the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination: “In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

  Accepting loss could lead me to take risks. Trying to hold on was a doomed attempt to avoid sorrow. It was futile to try to screw nature or stop time. Loss accepted with grace could help me do something good for the world. Like Bobby, I could turn my grief into love.

  In the weeks after the assassination, the campaign volunteers formed a new group called the Kennedy Action Corps. We were supposed to rally to carry out Bobby’s mission without him. We were supposed to take up the cause the way he had taken up the cause after his own brother’s death. Though I’d had a glimpse of it, I was a long way from getting to acceptance myself, a long way from acquiring Aeschylus’s “wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

  Going to headquarters only made me feel more despair. It reminded me of the hope we’d felt during the campaign, and then of the night Bobby had been murdered. No matter what we did, it looked like Nixon was going to get elected. After a few attempts at participating, my brothers and I stopped going.

  On Father’s Day, we brought my father home for a visit, and then he returned to the mental hospital to complete his shock treatments over the summer.

  Present, Living Room, Sunday, 3:00 p.m.

  My brother Paul sits on the floor in the sunken 1970s-era conversation pit off my living room. He is putting together the metal tracks for his toy train. He’s had the train, a 1955 American Flyer, since the year it was released, when I was three and he was eight. I watch as he pulls the conveyance out of its boxes, a black engine with a tender behind it, loaded with a molded, texturally accurate bed of fake coal, and the four deep green passenger cars with windows that look like drawn shades with lights behind them.

  “I used to pretend I was sitting behind one of those windows,” I say, “and going to parts unknown in your train.” I pat my brother’s shoulder. “The train still looks exactly the same to me. It hasn’t shown its age.”

  “It’s held up pretty well.”

  “It’s not falling apart like some of the things you refuse to throw away.”

  “It makes me sad to throw things away,” he says. “I know,” I say.

  The train is one of his few objects that Gary and I allow him to keep in our house. It is one of the few mementos whose value we recognize. I have no sympathy for Paul’s antiquated Polaroid cameras and binoculars, the forty years’ worth of Life and Look magazines—”But some of them have Bobby Kennedy on the cover,” he’ll say, knowing how to get to me.

  He also has reel-to-reel tape recordings of my father screaming at him. “Proof,” he says. Proof.

  Maybe I like the train because of its refusal to show its age. Its relatively slow decay does not remind me so much of my own aging.

  “I can’t believe that Eva is really gone,” Paul says. “I invite her to come and visit, but she never shows up.”

  “I don’t think she’s the type who would want to haunt anyone,” I say. “She’d think she was being a bother.”

  “I miss her.”

  “I miss her too,” I say. “Every day. I feel her with me when I’m cooking. She spent so much time at the stove. When I stir a pot of spaghetti sauce or stew, I feel her guiding my hand . . . not really . . . just the memory.” As far as I can tell, my mother and father aren’t anywhere. They are gone, poof, as my mother used to say. Still I want to give my brother a small piece of comfort. “Maybe she’s with you and just quiet,” I offer. “She was pretty quiet even when she
was alive, right?”

  “I would know if she were around,” he says.

  I think of my mother’s final days, and all we did to not lose her.

  “We did so much not to let go of her,” I say. “We kept her going too long. It was selfish. I still feel guilty for all the treatments we put her through at the end.”

  Neither Paul nor I could accept her impending death. While Ben protested, we subjected her to a feeding tube, breathing treatments, a central IV line.

  “Let her go,” Ben said, “just let her go,” but we couldn’t. We were holding out for what we’d never gotten from her. She seemed to be holding out too.

  “I’m going to miss seeing how the story turns out. Who wants to leave in the middle of the story?” she’d say. And over and over she would express her worry about Paul. “Promise me you’ll take care of him; he’s not as independent as you are.”

  I was at her bedside nearly every day during her last months, during her excursions back and forth between the emergency room, the ICU, a hospital room, and finally the rundown, honky-tonk, incongruously bright pink convalescent hospital where she died. Heart failure, recurrent pneumonia, scleroderma, Parkinson’s disease. High fevers, dementia, delirium.

  One day she thought she was back in the kindergarten classroom, teaching.

  “Come on,” she said to me and the nurse and housekeeper in the room, “help me gather up these papers that the kids have strewn all around. Pick them up; pick them up!” She couldn’t leave the bed but kept pointing to an empty spot on the floor and commanding our help.

  Another day she was preparing for a party in the house on Teasley Street.

  “We’ve got to clean up, the guests are coming,” she said, “C’mon, Nathan and Sonia and the boys.”

  I knew enough not to dispute these fantasies but was never sure how deeply to enter into them with her.

  In the hospital, I wiped her forehead with a wet cloth after she emerged from a life-threatening bout of pneumonia. She’d had a troubling dream. “I was locked in a trunk at the bottom of the ocean,” she said. “Why didn’t you come and rescue me? I kept pounding and pounding on the trunk.”

  “You were too far away,” I said. “I couldn’t hear you.”

  She would be incoherent, babbling, for hours at a time, for days at a time, and then start to make sense, and I would ride the tail of that sense for as long as I could.

  “I woke up in the middle of the night frightened,” she said, “and I went to my mother in her bed and asked her to get up and be with me . . . ‘I’m going to frow up, I’m going to frow up,’ I said. ‘I’m too tired,’ she said. She didn’t want to have to get up and take care of me.”

  “What?” I said.

  In my mother’s delirium her pronouns would get confused, you and I and he and she and me. Was it the influence of her Filipina nurse who had a similar tendency in English, or crossed circuitry?

  “Did that happen to you?” I asked. “I think you’re remembering something that happened to me, when you were the mother.”

  “To me?”

  “To me, Deborah, your daughter. I’m the one who couldn’t pronounce ‘th’ and said frow up instead of throw up. Remember?”

  “No, to me. I was a little girl and my mother, my mother . . .” She looked baffled.

  Had it happened to her first? Had she only been repeating with me what had happened between her and her stoic Russian mother who did not countenance middle-of-the-night drama? Perhaps her own mother rejected her and set a pattern she could not help but repeat. A chill went through me.

  “What do you remember?” I said. “Please try to concentrate and tell me again what you’re saying.”

  She had submerged once more into delirium; I could never get her to talk about it again. She just could have been confused, or finally, on her death bed, felt as I’d felt as a child.

  Then one night as I leaned down to kiss her goodnight, she surfaced, completely lucid. She opened her eyes wide, still green and clear, and took my face in her hands. “I love you now, and I’ve always loved you, and I’ll love you forever,” she said.

  The words seemed to come out of her mouth so easily; why had it taken this long for her to say them? She’d seldom used the word love when I was a child; she was skeptical of parents who told their children they loved them all the time, as if that were a form of spoiling that would devalue a precious commodity.

  I’ve hoarded those words ever since. Hoarded them like Paul hoards his artifacts from the past. I never told him. I never told anyone. I felt embarrassed, wondering if I had kept her alive those weeks, put her through all those interventions, invasions, held her hostage until she would say what I’d been waiting my entire life to hear. I kept waiting for those words to free me, so I could, in turn, release her.

  On the early morning when my mother lay unconscious, dying, Paul appeared. He lay down on the bed beside her and took her into his arms. She was limp, her eyes up in her head, her extremities pale and blood-starved, her chest and arms mottled with blue. He stroked her head. He ran his fingers through her hair. He spoke to her. “It’s all right to go,” he said. “Go toward the light.” I could not lie down next to her; if I did, I would not be able to resist the pull to go with her.

  Paul puts the train on the tracks and watches it make one successful revolution after another. I remember when we played trains together on the green living room carpet. My brother got to operate the train, and I was in charge of creating the toy villages and cities, the fire stations, and horse corrals, the air field that the train passed. There were sheep and lambs and pigs and horses enclosed by a white picket fence. A whole other world inside the tracks, inside the house on Teasley Street. A story we made up together.

  “Doesn’t it feel like yesterday when we played trains?” he says.

  “Some days it feels like a lot of time has passed, and some days as if no time at all. Then I look in the mirror, and there all those years are, barreling through my flesh.”

  “I feel like sixteen. I think I stopped at sixteen,” Paul says.

  “I look like a grown-up on paper,” I say. “I look pretty good on paper, I guess, but some days I can’t get past five.”

  “You were cute at five.”

  “You know, I’m writing a memoir about our family,” I say. “Do you want to read it?”

  “I’m not sure. I bet if I wrote it, though, it would be a much different story.”

  “To the writer belongs the story. You could write your own version; no one’s stopping you. Maybe if you wrote, you wouldn’t have to hold onto so much actual stuff. Maybe you could find some peace in writing about it.”

  “Has it given you peace?”

  I laugh. My brother knows better.

  “At least it takes up less room in my house.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Released

  After three months, the psychiatric hospital released my father. His diagnosis remained unsettled. He’d finished the shock treatments and gained back a little weight. He seemed calmer, and his mood more even. The doctors had put him on the relatively crude tranquilizers and antipsychotic medications of the day and gotten him off the sedatives and sleeping pills. There wasn’t much else they could do for him.

  I went along with my mother to pick him up. On the way home, we stopped to get him a haircut. She directed the barber: neat and trim. Another minor betrayal, the barber cut my father’s hair shorter than he ever would have chosen. I grieved his beautiful black curls as they fell onto the black-and-white checked linoleum floor. I pretended not to see how hard his hands still shook under the white smock. But in the end, my father proved vain as ever, preening and striking poses, and making faces at what he still seemed to regard as his irresistibly handsome visage in the mirrored wall across from him. He seemed unaware of what his expedition into the lowest recesses of his psyche had cost him—had cost us.

  Back at home in my parents’ bedroom, I kept him company while he unpacked and
my mother made lunch. His movements looked mechanical as he shuffled back and forth between his duffel bag on the bed and his bureau, as he put away his clothes. He act ed as if he were still in an institution, obeying some authority that was watching him and grading his behavior. His underwear and T-shirts came out of the bag with the sharp smell of bleach, labeled at the neck and waistband with his last name in bold black letters and folded by the hospital laundry at crisp right angles. He placed them gingerly back into his drawers.

  And then, from the seemingly deflated duffel bag, they began to emerge, what my father had made during the hour a day dedicated to what the hospital called occupational therapy, and we called arts and crafts. The only thing concrete that my father had to show for his months in the mental hospital: ducks. Ceramic ducks he had been instructed to paint and decorate. I suspected he could have chosen to make other objects, to graduate from ducks to songbirds, even to larger mammals, but true to his obsessive nature, he stayed with those ducks.

  He pulled one after another out of his bag, lined them up across his dresser. A shooting gallery row of ducks. Even now, I can imagine the museum card for his exhibit in a show of outsider art: “Ducks Numbered 1 to 12 by Ira Lott, mental patient.”

  On the first bird in the series, my father had painted the wings a different color than the body, had pricked a smeared dot of black over the stamped indented circle that represented the bird’s eye. After a while, the ducks became identical, each painted in a monochrome—eyes, body, feathers, bill. Without delineated eyes, these ducks looked blind.

  My father appraised them proudly, then selected one bird, as if it were different from all the others, as if it were special.

  “Look what I made for you,” he said, holding the duck out to me as though it were a precious artifact, a gift. It was painted the same color as all the rest, a shade somewhere between aqua blue and turquoise, the backdrop color for the phantom dancing horses from the long-gone wallpaper in our dining room. My father’s favorite color. My favorite color still. The color of tranquility.