Mommie Dearest

by Christina Crawford

  On Sunday if she got up in time we had to go to church. We would get all dressed up and drive to the Christian Science church in Beverly Hills. Most of the time I went to Sunday School which I hated. Not the school itself but the whole process. Because we didn’t go often enough, I had to constantly go to the office and be reassigned to a class. I almost never knew either the teacher or any of the other children and was usually behind in the lessons. I liked the singing and used to wish that the rest of it would just be over quickly. I was always given quarters for the donation and had them securely tucked inside my white gloves. We didn’t always have to wear a hat, but I always had to wear white gloves whenever we went anywhere. Once in a while, I was allowed to go inside the big church and sit with my mother. I always tried to sit very still and be a good girl. Even though I liked the big church a lot better than Sunday School, it was very hard to sit still that long, especially since I didn’t really understand most of the big words in Mary Baker Eddy’s book. The singing was always nice and I knew most of the words to the hymns, so I enjoyed that part and looked out the window or daydreamed through the rest of it. The problem came on the drive home when mother asked me the inevitable question of “What did you learn today in church?” Try as I might, I never quite got the whole thing straight. I could remember some of the Bible stories, but not much from Mrs. Eddy. Mother would sigh and explain the parts I’d left out and I would sit in silence the rest of the way home.

  If we didn’t go to church on Sunday for whatever reasons, after lunch mother would call me into her sitting room while Chris took his nap. She would sit on the couch and I would sit on the floor and together we would do the lesson. Christian Science had each Sunday worked out so that you could do it at home. I always thought that was very clever. There was a little pamphlet that told you which chapters and verses of the Bible to read followed by which pages from Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. By this time I could read adequately and mother would always give me some of the Bible parts to read aloud. When we had finished with that, she would read Mrs. Eddy’s words because I couldn’t yet pronounce most of them. What I remember most is the part about God is good and there is no evil, sickness or death. But again, I’m afraid I daydreamed through most of it.

  After the lesson was over which took about an hour and a half and she’d given me a few moments to stretch, mother would place the regular call to Sorkie in New York. I met Sorkie only once when I was a very small child but until her death in 1959 she was probably the most influential person in mother’s life. Sorkie was a Christian Science practitioner who lived by herself in a small apartment in New York City. Mother had met her when she was quite young herself and was devoted to Sorkie. I understand that Sorkie was a plump if not rotund woman and to the best of my knowledge she is the only fat person mother ever tolerated.

  Mother called Sorkie almost every day for nearly 25 years. Sorkie knew everything there was to know about mother and us and mother’s friends and every event of our lives. On Sunday we called Sorkie to tell her we loved her and had done our lessons. We always had to report to Sorkie after church as well. She had a kind voice and was always pleasant to talk to. After I told her I loved her, she would speak to mother for a while when I was not allowed in the room.

  Mother could call Sorkie any time of the day or night. Sorkie was somehow always home when mother called and would talk to her for as long as she wanted. Mother trusted her absolutely and as I look back I think she was the only person in the whole world that mother did trust. Year after year mother poured out her heart, her troubles and her triumphs to Sorkie and Sorkie was always there, as close as the phone. In the years to come, whenever there was trouble in the house which was progressively more frequent, mother would be on the phone to her for advice, solace and counsel. I think Sorkie was the only person in the world that mother felt was really there for her under any conditions and all circumstances. It was a constant sustaining influence in a turbulent unpredictable existence. Sorkie was a combination surrogate mother, spiritual leader and emotional counselor. Although mother categorically refused to even consider any form of psychological guidance in later years I think in many ways Sorkie provided that kind of therapy and much more.

  For us kids it was often infuriating to have a voice on the phone be so overwhelmingly influential in our lives. When we got in serious fights with mother or some other equally disastrous event had taken place we either had to speak to Sorkie who usually made us apologize to mother or mother herself would call Sorkie and translate what advice she had supposedly given. One way or the other, the result was usually that mother was right and we were wrong and nothing much had changed except that mother felt vindicated and morally justified in meeting out the punishments that always followed. I don’t know if Sorkie really ever knew the entire story or not and it really doesn’t matter any more one way or the other. Among her friends no one had the influence over mother that Sorkie did and in fact I don’t think most of them even knew about their relationship except that she was a Christian Science practitioner and to most people that was not a particularly specific definition. But for me Sorkie’s voice over the phone was often the court of last resort. Though she was a kind lady, I’m sure, the decision was rarely in my favor.

  That mother was a Christian Scientist did not preclude us being sent to doctors nor prevent her from either smoking or drinking. Those were ideals, she explained, goals toward which one worked. However, in the meantime, one had to do what was necessary. We had regular check ups by old Dr. Fish and when we were sick he would come to see us on house calls. Mother also had her doctors upon whom she increasingly relied as the years went by. I think it might be an oversimplification to say that later on she became a hypochondriac, but it was something very close to that.

  There were times, however, when her fetish for cleanliness became a mania and took possession of her. It was then that she took three and four showers a day and brushed her teeth every few hours. She never could stand to have her hands dirty and would wash them regularly. She had one closet with shelves full of cleanliness potions for every conceivable part of her body and used them all with religious fervor. She bathed and scrubbed and brushed and douched. It never seemed to be quite sufficient, but rather just managed to keep the worst of the scourges away from her.

  This same preoccupation with cleanliness permeated the house we lived in. When she wasn’t working she organized regular forays into every nook and cranny of the house and yard. No sergeant in charge of latrine duty could have done any better. It was at these times when frustration or anxiety or just sheer insanity overtook her that she mustered every able bodied creature within shouting distance of the house and pressed them into service. We were always an unlikely crew and one that fell far short of mother’s expectations. We were never fast enough nor diligent enough or tenacious enough to please her. She fired commands faster than any number of us could facilitate and that sent her into a frenzy. She was surrounded by dolts and nincompoops, dunces and malingerers. Was no one besides herself even remotely competent in this world? Was it so much to ask that literate human beings comprehend a simple order? Why was she chosen out of the multitude to suffer the indignities of inferior servants and simple-minded children? Through these exhortations and the added threat of permanent and total banishment from her presence forever she prodded her troops ever onward. Under her command three female fans, a nurse, a secretary and two small children under the age of eight accomplished miracles. Together we moved tons of books, boxes, furniture and clothes. In teams we cleaned out closets, scrubbed down and repainted lawn furniture. We moved trunks from one storage basement to another; we hauled and swept and pushed and pulled and mopped and rearranged until she was satisfied or until her own craziness had subsided, whichever came first.

  CHAPTER 6

  The worst of these voyages into cleanomania were what later became known between my brother and myself as the terrifying night raids.

  What was so frighteni
ng about the night raids was that they could never be predicted. They sprang full blown without warning. We were always asleep and it was always dark outside when they started. Months would go by without a night raid and then there it would be startling you out of a sound sleep, running full speed ahead and already out of control.

  I never did figure out what mysterious combination of external and internal events lead up to mother’s volcanic behavior. To this day I still do not know. What I know is that they were the most dreaded of all the journeys she took us through.

  There are three night raids that are still vividly clear in my mind and they are fairly typical of the others.

  Chris and I had already moved into Mr. Terry’s old room which had been totally redecorated featuring twin beds, new wallpaper and new furniture. There were sliding door closets built into one wall of the bathroom which Chris used. My closet was a large walk-in the size of a small room which was right across from my bed nearest the door. It had it’s own light and clothes rods on three sides. Shoes went on the bottom neatly lined up on the built in racks and there were shelves above. When a night raid was in progress I was awakened out of a sound sleep by a crashing sound in my closet. When I opened my eyes, sitting bolt upright in bed, I saw that the light was on and various objects were flying out of my closet. Inside the closet mother was in a rage. She was swearing a blue streak and muttering to herself. I dared not move out of my bed for fear of her wrath being taken out on me directly rather than the contents of my closet. After my closet was totally demolished and nearly everything in to spewn out unto my bed and the floor, mother emerged breathless and triumphant. She had a wild look to her eyes and as she descended upon me I was terrified. She grabbed me by my hair and dragged me into the closet. There before me I saw total devastation. The closet was a total shambles. It looked like she’d taken her arms and pushed everything off the shelves. Then she’d ripped the clothes off their hangers and thrown both clothes and hangers out into the room where they lay strewn over half the floor. Last to go were the shoes which she’d taken up and thrown hard enough to hit the far wall of the bedroom clattering against the Venetian blinds as they fell.

  Shaking me by the hair of my head she screamed in my ear, “No wire hangers! No wire hangers!” With one hand she pulled me by the hair and with the other she cuffed my ears until they rang and I could hardly hear her screaming. When she finished cuffing me she released my hair and dumped me on the floor. Then she would rip my bed apart down to the mattress cover, throwing the sheets and blankets across the room. When she had totally destroyed my entire part of the bedroom she stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, “Clean up your mess”, she growled turning on her heel. The only other sound I heard was the double doors to her room slamming shut.

  Had I bothered to look at the clock I would have seen that it was well past midnight. I didn’t make the effort anymore because it was a useless waste of my strength. I did look to see if Chris was still alive in the next bed. Once he was sure that she was gone and not going to come back he turned his body slowly to face me. It was probably the first time he’d dared to stir since the beginning of the night raid. He couldn’t get up because he was tied down to the bed. Mother had a barbarian devise she called a sleep safe with which she made sure Chris could not get out of bed. It was like a harness which was made out of heavy canvas tapes and it fastened in the back. It was originally designed to keep babies from falling out of bed but mother had the thing modified to accommodate a growing boy. The way it worked was that the person lay face down upon the sheet and the straps came around the middle and across the shoulders and all four pieces were fastened together with a huge steel safety pin like they use for horse blankets. From the time I can remember, we were forbidden to get out of bed at night to go to the bath-room or get a drink of water. However, there were times when Chris simply had to go to the bathroom and I would undo the wretched sleep safe and stand guard while he raced to the bathroom and jumped back into bed. We had it timed as well as an Indianapolis pit stop. Both of our lives depended on expert teamwork. I would have gotten in more trouble than Chris if we’d ever been discovered and we both knew it. He would have gotten beaten for getting out of bed, but I would have been nearly killed for letting him out of the sleep safe.

  This particular night raid he had escaped scott free and I didn’t begrudge him that. He couldn’t get up to comfort me and didn’t even dare whisper for fear mother somehow would hear us and return. He looked at me sadly and through my tears I stared back at him. My head hurt where she had grabbed my hair and as I gingerly rubbed it a few snatches of hair actually fell out. But the frightful ringing in my ears was beginning to subside and I was grateful for that at least. Slowly I pulled myself to my feet and surveyed the damage. All this, I thought, for a couple of lousy wire hangers. Evidently what had happened is that something had come back from the cleaners or the laundry downstairs on wire hangers. They were forbidden in our closets and although I knew that in advance, I hadn’t changed them right away. I guess it hadn’t seemed terribly important at the time which at the present moment I found very unfortunate.

  It took me hours to redo the closet with everything neatly folded and put back on the shelves, all the clothes returned to their proper hangers. I then blearily mated up the shoes and lined them neatly on the rack. Just as I turned out the closet light I remembered that my bed still had to be remade and seriously thought about just sleeping on the floor. But there was still the possibility that mother might return and I dared not chance a repeat performance. Chris had fallen asleep hours before. As I struggled to remake my bed in near exhaustion I realized that it was beginning to get light.

  The day after one of the night raids, all was ominously silent. I don’t know if the servants knew about them and simply kept their doors locked or if our room was far enough away that the sound didn’t carry to the other side of the house. Generally mother didn’t speak a word to me for several days after a raid and in fact I rarely saw her. I was sort of silently banished for a period of time and then as mysteriously as it had materialized, the situation disappeared and life returned to near normal.

  There was one night raid the whole house heard because it took place in mother’s dressing room with all the doors open and lasted for a long time.

  As a punishment for some infringement of the rules now long forgotten, mother had decreed that while she was out for the day I had to clean her dressing room. It was a large room with mirrored walls over the sink at one end of the room and the glass top dressing table built into the other. The floor was blue linoleum of some kind and there were two white throw rugs. So during the better part of the afternoon I had cleaned the large mirrors, polished the dressing table and scoured the sink. Then I had to scrub the floor with a mop and dry it on my hands and knees with an old torn bath towel so it wouldn’t streak. Both the nurse and I were satisfied that I’d really done a good job even though I wasn’t more than nine years old. It had been one of the hardest jobs I’d been given to do alone and I was glad it was over. I didn’t get to play at all that day but at least the punishment was over.

  However, I was not destined to get off so easy. In the middle of that night one of the most vicious night raids took place.

  As usual I was sound asleep when mother burst into the room. She was already yelling as she hauled me out of bed. Before I was fully awake she had dragged me by one arm down the hallway that connected her suite of rooms with ours. Through the open double doors I stumbled as she shoved me ahead of her. I had no idea what was wrong or where we were going but I was now wide awake. When we arrived in her dressing room it began to dawn on me what was happening. Something was wrong with the way I’d cleaned the room earlier in the day, even though the nurse had inspected all my work and told me it was perfectly satisfactory. The best I could gather from mother’s ranting and raving was that the floor had streaks in it. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it, but then neither I nor anyone else seemed to have the
same set of standards as she did. Then I made one of my classic mistakes and said that I didn’t see anything wrong with the floor. That sent her into a renewed fit of anger. With lightning speed she backhanded me squarely across the face which caught me off balance and sent me to the floor. She then threw open the door under the sink and grabbed the large can of Bon Ami scouring powder. Just as I got to my feet she flew at me in a frenzy, wielding the can of Bon Ami like a baseball bat. She beat me over the head with the Bon Ami until the can burst open with a small explosion. A cloud of white scouring powder filled the entire room settling over every square inch of mirror and glass and linoleum. I had that powder in my hair and all over my nightgown. It was getting into my mouth and I sputtered and spit it out for fear it would poison me. She was still screaming and beating me with the mutilated can. But this time I know I was yelling back at her to stop and the noise must have awakened everyone. When finally she threw the useless container across the room in total disgust it looked like there had just been a snowstorm inside these four walls. “Clean it up” was all she said. “How?” I asked. “You figure it out”, she stormed and left me. I sat down and puffs of the white powder billowed up around me.

  I can’t even begin to describe the terrible mess that faced me. I couldn’t use a vacuum cleaner because in those days all we had was one of the old fashioned uprights that were only good for carpets. All I had was a broom and a bucket, a couple of big towels and a mop. I had to go over everything in that room four or five times because the powder made a white film as soon as it got wet and there was an entire can of it scattered around the room. It was tedious and torturous work. Before I could even begin I had to wash my own face and neck. The powder stuck to my body and as I sweated with the work, little rivulets of perspiration coagulated with the powder in white patches that began to itch after a while. There was no time to go and take a shower so I just continued to try to clean up this unbelievable mess.