White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  But—it was not an engagement ring. It had diamonds embedded in its side, forming a curvy pattern. Was he proposing or offering me jewels from a pharmacy?

  “Jon,” I said slowly, thinking back to that walk we took when I asked him point-blank if he liked me. “What exactly is going on here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You need me to spell it out for you?” he asked. “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I need you to spell it out. And, yes. I will marry you.”

  He slipped the ring on my shaking finger. “I bought one I can return,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d like it.”

  I. Was. Getting. Married.

  Me.

  Awkward. Nerdy. Me.

  “You schlepped this for a week through Israel?” was all I could say.

  He kissed me. We held hands, my new stones pressing dents into both our skins. “We’re getting married,” I finally uttered. The biggest decision of my life thus far, made without a line of neurotic dialogue. Not even a second to think. “Can you believe it?”

  Then we both said, “Let’s call the mothers.”

  Jon’s asked to speak to me. “Wise decision,” she said, Englishly. “Congratulations. Good choice.”

  I knew mine would not react in quite the same way.

  “Mom, there’s something I have to tell you.” We were both silent for a moment before I declared the news: “Jon and I are getting married.” I braced myself for the cries of joy, the thank gods.

  Instead, she gasped. “Are you sure?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know?”

  “What do you mean, how do I know?”

  “Did he ask you?”

  “Yes, yes, he asked me.” Christ, could she not be happy, trusting, responding to my reality, for one fucking second? (And I wondered why I second-guessed everything.)

  “So you’re getting married.”

  “Yes.”

  “For real?”

  “Yes!”

  That’s when my mother began to wail—for twenty minutes straight. For the first time, her howl sounded a little less like a bomb-shelter siren, and a little more like life.

  • FIFTEEN •

  SMALL STEPS

  Montreal, 2008

  “We need to go to social services,” I told Dad as I got into his car, my lines rehearsed. I was in Montreal to help my parents get outfits for my wedding, but my priorities had shifted. “Now.” For years, I’d wanted to get help, sure there were medications, therapies, solutions. Dad continually dissuaded me, claiming it was all useless, that these interventions often caused more harm than good. But I had to do something. “This is getting insane.”

  I looked over at him watching the road. He had enormous bags under his eyes, the wrinkled skin sallow and dark. “OK,” he said.

  Really?

  “They’re open until eight p.m. for urgent drop-ins,” I explained, my words tripping over one another. I was in no way prepared for this response. “Let’s see what they have to say.”

  Dad put his foot on the gas, pumped the pedal.

  I clasped my hands, squeezed tight.

  This was actually happening.

  • • •

  “COME OVER IMMEDIATELY.” That morning, Mom’s voice was shrill over the echo-ey budget phone. “It’s critical.”

  Just a few months after our engagement, Mom’s suicide calls had become constant. I was always calling back, checking in, the bad Samaritan hotline. This, interspersed with dozens of daily phone sessions planning a wedding: heavy hors d’oeuvres or a smoked-meat station? Should the breadbaskets have a napkin inside and if so, would you like it to match or contrast with the tablecloths? Diamantés in the stamens of the corsages or just the bouquet? (Do I look like I know? I never even thought I’d have a boyfriend!)

  On this visit, Dad had asked me to stay at Carlton to keep an eye on Moishe, as Eli was out of town. Though I found it hard to be at my parents’ house, now I felt rejected from it. I’d always assumed that I was shunned for leaving, but suddenly I wondered if my demands for cleanliness had been difficult for them, that they’d actually wanted me to go.

  But not this morning, when Mom called me first thing, waking me up, demanding that I come over so she could talk to me. I managed my way out through piles of snow and onto the 161 bus, the one I used to take the other way, escaping from my house to downtown, to anywhere. I recalled the bus-lady my mother had been, plonked between Filipino housekeepers but with more bags and less makeup, embarrassing me in front of other kids whose mothers drove Jeeps. Now it was me freezing alongside cleaning ladies and elementary schoolchildren, my socks wet within my London shoes that were by no means a match for this weather. The rubber floors were wet, covered in a brown-gray slush like toothbrush foam, the dreaded liquid of my youth, leaving salty traces that you’d notice only after it had dried; rings that circled right around your pants, higher up than you’d ever assumed the water could reach. I’d never visited my house before as a guest and wondered where I’d sit, to where I’d retreat. There was no space, nowhere to settle, nothing to do but lounge in Mom’s kitchen, be lulled into her story, her world.

  The bus rode along Fleet Road and I thought of the real Fleet Street in London, the one of newspaper fame, lined with pubs from the 1620s. Canada always struck me as a movie set, a place where everything was too new; the oldest restaurants advertised that they’d been in business “depuis 1995.” My new world felt old, my old one, new. I lived a split screen, confused about my position in both, wondering what of me remained constant.

  The bus trudged on, tired against the weather. Fleet connected Carlton to Kildare, the only two family houses left. Both Hutchison and even Campden had, to my shock, eventually been sold—my mother had had to let them go. The triangle had deflated to a line; the whole business of the inheritance should have been over. But as I’d had a hunch all along, it wasn’t and wouldn’t be. Because it wasn’t about the inheritance.

  I was relieved to be in Montreal alone. The last time Jon visited, Mom had bolted all the doors and even many drawers inside the house. She’d locked Jon upstairs, and the next night, the door to Dad’s bathroom. This was Dad’s last straw and he exploded in a way I’d never seen, lunging at her across the table, nearly throttling her in our kitchen. Jon fled to my old room and closed the door; I had to physically pry Dad’s hands off Mom’s throat, and then calm him by telling him I understood how frustrating this all was. Then, Mom screamed at me, accusing me of taking his side. She was right, I conceded as I headed back to reassure my traumatized boyfriend.

  And I’d been worried about the hoarding.

  Now, the bus swerved along old familiar roads. The ride home. I recalled my old feelings: I pray no one is there. But of course, today I wasn’t going home, I was going to see my mother, and she was definitely there.

  I trudged down the street as quickly as possible and up her stairs, my anger mounting as I pressed the doorbell repeatedly, aggressively, until I saw Mom’s eyes peek out from behind the blinds. I heard various clicks and the unchaining of bolts, and finally Mom let me in, hugging me quickly, then leading me to the kitchen for the talk. I forced my frustration under my skin.

  “Where are my glasses?” my mother screeched as we sat down. “They’re taking things from me. And all my papers.” She ruffled through piles and files along the table. “They’ve made everything a mess. I can’t find anything.”

  They made a mess? I thought of my lost bat mitzvah checks, how months after the event I was still begging her for the guests’ addresses so I could send thank you cards, and how months after that, Mom had made me write each one a full essay apologizing for why I had been so late in writing. I’d been devoured by her disorder. Now, there were crumbs everywhere. The beige linoleum tiles peeled o
ff the floor. Food and grime covered the counter. The chair fabric was sticky. My mother’s hair had gone completely gray and was piled in a bun atop her head. She’d locked herself into her house, a shut-in, shutting out, melding with the building, her mind’s mess stamped on every surface.

  “You look like you lost weight,” I said.

  “Who knows? I’m probably dying,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”

  I felt my neck stiffen, my guard shooting up. But then I looked at her face, the terror wild in her eyes, fear like shining flames in her dark pupils, her whole being possessed by this all-consuming dread. “Fine,” I said softly. “For one hour.”

  “Fine.”

  It was as easy as that. I could make a limit. Instead of entering her world wholly, I could meet her at the threshold.

  Not to say that the hour was easy. “Let me start at the beginning,” my mother said, now that she had an audience. “It was the spring of 1998.”

  “Mom, I know—”

  “You gave me an hour!”

  I reheard the story, literally biting my tongue so as not to constantly disagree. But the conversation took an unusual turn. My mother was now convinced that people were breaking into the house, looking for her secrets, rifling through her files. “That car parked in front of the house,” she said, “is spying on me. The children next door too. The neighbors.” Then she pointed to a pencil. “I’ve heard they put cameras in the erasers,” she whispered. “They’re coming to get me. How can I possibly go on?”

  I imagined this world of hers, in which every molecule was attacking her and she was a 24/7 victim of massive threat. She built bigger and bigger walls around her to protect herself but all she was doing was creating a smaller and smaller, deathly dangerous universe inside. “Maybe the car’s just parked—” I tried.

  “For days at a time?” she shot back.

  I shut up, tried to keep calm, examining the stale food on the counter, the residues of sauce and bread on the dirty plates covering the table. The tea bags so old, so dry, that the paper came undone in hot water, leaving leaves floating around your mug. It made no sense to me how people could live this way, how my parents, warm and alive, intelligent and educated, could live in what was no longer mess but dirt and debris. I’d stopped asking to hire a cleaner (or repairman, or plumber, or doctor) as I knew I’d only be met with resistance—from fear of the intruder, but perhaps also from shame. It’s not my dilapidating house, it’s not my mess, I kept repeating to mute my feelings. Finally, I couldn’t take it, the intensity, the bizarreness, the victimhood, the wretched sadness that was for nothing. I exploded: “You’re not rich. You’re not powerful. Why would anyone be after your stuff? Who would care? I don’t understand what reality you’re living in right now, but it’s not mine.”

  I’d gone too far. I cringed, waiting for her explosion, but again she surprised me. “Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you for not being against me, for listening to my side. That’s all I want—for you to acknowledge my story.”

  Maybe, I thought, that’s all anyone wanted—someone to see us.

  • • •

  THAT AFTERNOON, I phoned Maya, who was now back in Canada and who was also—hallelujah—getting married. After a discussion about designer ketubahs and her oocyte prenup arrangement, she asked how my family was. She knew my mother wasn’t well, though not the extent of it; she herself came from Holocaust survivors and refugees—though ones who were more functional.

  “She’s just not getting help,” was what I said. “It’s so stressful to see her suffer, to see the anxious, obsessive thinking that’s taken over her life.” I didn’t say more.

  “It’s so hard,” Maya said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m thirty-one years old, and can barely deal with this now: how did I cope when I was a child? When I didn’t understand psychology, when I was defenseless, needy?” I recalled my pig-lined credenza, the Bonimart panics, the terror of each stride into the store that was going to eat me up. The unnecessary anguish of every weekend. “Each time I interact with my mom, it’s double: the pain of the present and the past, when I was vulnerable and had no one to protect me.”

  This was ridiculous. Calla-lily bridal bouquets, kosher-style menus: even in a foreign country, I could plan a grand fête. I was making my own family. I had fashioned a new, better life. This craziness was not acceptable.

  I was strong enough to make Mom a better life too.

  • • •

  AND SO, THERE we were, Dad and me, driving along Fleet, my heart beating wildly. Dad had spent decades complaining about the endless stop signs on this street, but they’d never been as annoying as now, when at each pause, at each release from the gas, I was sure he’d change his mind. I was too nervous to talk anymore, and recalled the time a few years earlier when he picked me up from the gym, and out of nowhere, turned down the volume of his talk radio show, stopped the car and said: “Judy, marriage is hard enough when you’re from the same religion.” At the time, amid my total surprise (this was the closest we’d ever come to any discussion of romance, and one of his few acknowledgments of my adulthood), I’d thought he was judging my particularly un-Jewish lineup of boyfriends. But now I wondered if it was his way of telling me, even ages ago, that he needed help.

  A year earlier I’d been in Montreal when Dad got sick. His lungs. The clouds on the X-ray ranged from light to dark black, not yes malignant or no malignant but literal shades of gray, amorphous silhouettes that had no place inside a man of thick tennis soles and bold one-liners, of hardened perspective and solid structures. The doctor had asked him to undress and I got up to leave. “No, stay,” Dad had said. Stay? I was repulsed, terrified, by his need. In front of me were all the things I didn’t want to know. Dad’s saggy flesh, his sunken chest, his pale lower back that curved inward. Soft flab hanging from his thigh, bones jetting out like broken umbrella wires. I thought of all the hospitals we’d been to together for my colitis. How he’d raced to the emergency room when Eli hit his head on the monkey bars, his shirt soaked in his son’s blood. Each time, he was the leader, the belligerent advocate saying, “Tell me what you see.” But that day, the pulmonologist shut off the light box, and Dad’s whole lungs went black. “Wait,” I’d insisted, but my voice had wobbled and I said no more.

  Not this time, I vowed. Today I would be fierce, bellicose. In charge.

  We soon arrived at the Cavendish Mall. Social Services was in the small office building above the main entrance, across from where Pumperniks had once resided. Dad, who’d made a full recovery from what turned out to be pneumonia, drove right up to the door.

  “I’ll wait for you in the entrance while you park,” I said.

  “Oh no,” he said. “I’m not coming.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll circle.”

  I wanted to scream. For how long will you sit in your car, circling, waiting for Mom?

  “Judy,” he called, before driving off. “Don’t use her real name.”

  • • •

  THE CHAIRS IN the office were plastic, the desk was imitation wood, and the social worker, probably in her late thirties, had brown hair. Books and files were scattered around her station; I saw no names on them. She smiled, but not too wide. This was my moment, I thought. The solution to the main suffering of my existence was here, behind a blue ceramic flowerpot with two cacti.

  How to begin? I had no language for this discussion. Dad and I never talked about my mother in any way except to joke or complain about the melodrama. Now I had to let facts and vignettes drip out, including the Valium addiction and the suicide threats and the alarms. Don’t use her name. Don’t use your name. Don’t let them trace us.

  The social worker nodded and hmm-ed. She seemed familiar with “bad cases” like mine. My excitement was growing—perhaps she could help. “We’ll need your father’s permission to enter t
he house for an assessment,” she said.

  I was silent.

  “Your father wouldn’t agree?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Typical,” she said. “The partners of mentally ill people often become slightly ill themselves. After years of cohabitation, their reality shifts, their normal is skewed.”

  My mind flashed to Dad’s car, the trunk of which had become a worsening mess of plastic bags and tennis balls. I thought of his clothes piled all over the playroom. Forever, the family drowning.

  Then she handed me a stack of papers. “Don’t worry. Fill out all these forms. Go to court. Stress that your mother is a danger to herself and others—a life danger. Remember. That’s important. They might then keep her in for a few days.”

  A few days?

  I took the slew of pages, thinking: hell will be a room where they make me fill out government forms.

  And that was it.

  I walked out, my head spinning. I’d thought coming here would solve the problem, offer guidance, reprieve. I sighed. I was always looking for quick solutions, but it was going to be a long, long process.

  I walked out of the mall into the night looking for my circling dad, reminding myself: small steps.

  • SIXTEEN •

  30 WEEKS: RECOVERY ROOM

  New York City, 2011

  I clutched my notebook as I sped—as much as I could at my bloated size—through the long white hallway of the maternity ward. Motherhood might not have come naturally, but school did. A couple of months back I’d found out one uptown hospital ran a whole roster of parenting classes; I’d signed up for a semester’s worth of seminars.

  First, Jon and I participated in the “Babies and Pets” workshop. On Jon’s urging we’d adopted a rescue cat a few years earlier—a process that was much more complex than getting pregnant. I’d grown attached to Mones, who was an elegant but misanthropic tabby who vomited every time a child was near. Jon and I had arrived early and were first to express our concerns during circle time. “Our cat is so neurotic and anxious,” I announced. “I don’t know how she’ll ever adapt to having a baby around.” The other expectant parents then declared their worries, which were largely about whether or not their fifty-pound schnauzers would accidentally murder their newborns. After the session, Jon and I laughed at our ridiculousness. “Oh yeah, other people seemed concerned about their baby not being killed, not their pet’s complex emotional backstory.”