An Arrangement of Skin

by Anna Journey

  Growing up, the macabre character of my mother’s anecdotes didn’t strike me as unusual. I listened to their dark morals the same way I received the fairy tales she’d read to my little sister and me: rapt and at a safe distance. I imagined other people’s mothers told similar sorts of cautionary tales meant to encourage children to be vigilant: Don’t go into the woods by yourself. Don’t knock on a stranger’s door and get shoved into an oven. In one moment, she’d recount how Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid’s fishtail split into human legs, and that every step the transformed creature took felt like “walking on knives.” In another, she’d describe the dexterous feet of the armless thalidomide girl who attended her family’s Episcopalian church, in Jackson, and who could grip, at picnics, a slice of watermelon between her toes. If at bedtime my mother planned to read to us from a book in which bloodthirsty Norwegian cave trolls threatened to bite Peer Gynt’s bottom or gouge out his eyes, then bringing up the Manson murders over fried chicken earlier that night seemed “on message”: The world is a dangerous place. There’s a randomness to suffering and violence. I love you, but no one is safe.

  I don’t remember when my sister and I began referring to my mother’s most frequently repeated tales as “Mom’s Greatest Hits.” I think I was an undergraduate in art school, so it must’ve been when I was around nineteen and Rebecca was a junior in high school. I realized from my freshman roommate’s incredulous reactions that my mother’s stories might be peculiar: “She said what? So that’s where you get it from!” Somehow, I’d been able to reconcile my mother’s sunny, preternatural innocence and Southern charm with her interest in the most extreme or savage regions of human experience. On one side of the innocence/experience spectrum, she grew up a sheltered, middle-class Southern belle in Jackson, Mississippi: the Baby Boomer favorite daughter of a prominent psychiatrist and a gracious nurse. My mother was a longtime Girl Scout; attended a small women’s college in Columbus; taught fourth grade for several years before marrying my father; moved overseas and raised two children; and since the mid-nineties she’s worked two jobs as a cashier at JCPenney and a cheerful teacher’s aide to first-grade students at a suburban Virginia elementary school. Although I laughed when she confessed she didn’t know the meaning of the word “turd” until the summer after her first year of college (one of her father’s patients gave her the nickname when she worked at his hospital for a summer as a psychiatric aide), I wasn’t at all surprised. On the other side of the innocence/experience divide lie the monstrous or tragic figures that populate her “Greatest Hits”: Trotsky, Bundy, Rosie, Manson, the face-eating chimpanzee Travis. I’ve come to wonder whether the family dinner table conjures for my mother the crackling bonfires around which she sat during those six consecutive summers at Camp Wahi, first as a Girl Scout camper and then as a counselor telling “Bluebeard” to an audience of enthralled little girls.

  Part of my mother’s matter-of-fact attitude toward bizarre subjects likely comes from her own parents: their blend of clinical directness and their fondness for family history. My mother’s parents—native Texans—met just after World War II, at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, where my grandmother Dorothy Bowman worked as a nurse and where my grandfather Lisburn Clarence Hanes (“L. C.”) was enrolled in medical school. My grandparents often talked shop at the dinner table. They’d casually offer my mother and her younger sister Becky an anecdotal buffet of abnormalities, injuries, and illnesses as they passed the fried chicken. One story that fascinated my mother involved a grotesque discovery: My grandmother began her shift as a night supervisor and noticed that a boy born earlier that day wouldn’t stop crying. She checked the chart, on which a nurse from the earlier shift had recorded taking his temperature, which was done, in the mid-1940s, with a rectal thermometer. As my grandmother unwrapped the baby’s diaper and prepared to take his temperature, she discovered that the other nurse had lied on the chart. The child had been born without an anus—his buttocks were sealed completely shut, like the dimple in the side of an heirloom tomato. The image of my grandmother turning the newborn over in her hands to discover the missing feature shocked my mother, who retold the story to her own children around the supper table.

  To make sure we’d be able to escape from murderers or molesters if we were snatched while walking home from Oak View Elementary, my mother made Rebecca and me practice our lines and simulate being kidnapped as we stood side by side on the yellow tiles of our kitchen floor. “What do you say when he pulls into a gas station,” our mother asked, “or if he takes you into a convenience store?” “This man is not my father!” we shouted, giggling and nudging each other. “I’ve been kidnapped! Call the police!” We were eager to report to our mother our suspicions about the red-mustached man who lived down the block. He’d drag his green bags of yard waste to the curb, which, when viewed through binoculars pressed through a juniper hedge, resembled sacks filled with dismembered bodies. Rebecca and I lay in the grass, propped on our elbows, and scribbled in our spiral notebooks the outlines of elbows and feet that we imagined jutted incriminatingly from the plastic lawn bags. “Is that a nose?” Rebecca asked, hopefully. “Maybe a big toe?” “A nose. Definitely a nose,” I said, raising the field glasses to my eyes.

  My grandfather was careful not to divulge privileged information about his psychiatric patients, though he’d readily share with his family other aspects of his medical experience. His hulking, leather-bound Encyclopedia of Infectious Diseases and Medical Anomalies doubled as bedtime reading for my mother, who flipped, fascinated, through photographs, drawings, and descriptions of tumors, boils, skull fractures, and gargantuan limbs of patients swollen from elephantiasis. Although he worked in his middle age toward advancing integration policies, in Jackson, during the civil rights movement (prompting the Ku Klux Klan to plant a wooden cross in his front yard and set it on fire), he confessed his participation in a shameful tradition among the doctors at the hospital in Galveston. Approximately once a year, a young African American woman gave birth at the facility. Each time, she’d ask one of the residents to name her new child. The doctors conspired with one another to name each baby after a halogen element on the periodic table, which were, in their opinion, the most euphonic. I’ve wondered about that family of siblings who grew up along the Gulf Coast with the names Fluorine, Chlorine, Bromine, Iodine (pronounced “Eye-oh-deen”), and Astatine. My grandfather—haunted by his complicity—shook his head in chagrin at the tale’s insidious racism and classist condescension. Perhaps he—a lay reader who served the sacramental wine every Sunday at his Episcopalian church—repeated the story to his wife and children in the hopes that someone might eventually absolve him.

  Perhaps he was reminded of his own unusual first name, Lisburn—the name of that small town in Northern Ireland he’d never seen. Those syllables must have hissed, rare and sibilant, as they echoed through the dusty air among the Bobs, Bills, and Butches of his childhood in a tiny West Texas town called Wink. Perhaps the Halogen Daughters learned to abbreviate their wayward names the way my grandfather had, as he whittled his down to its initials: the simple L. C. Maybe he sipped his malt whiskey at the dinner table, implicated, as my mother and her little sister sat to his right and left, letting the reticent vowels of the elements roll off their tongues. Maybe he—a scientist—imagined the language gaining electrons as it grew increasingly reactive. As if the words, repeating, would attack all inert matter in the room.

  My mother’s favorite stories to tell around Girl Scout bonfires at Camp Wahi (which was named using abbreviations of the first half of each word in “Water Hill” and located just outside of Brandon, Mississippi) were the marital horror story “Bluebeard,” by Charles Perrault, and the violent fairy tale about sibling rivalry, “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes,” recounted by the Brothers Grimm. In addition to serving as a counselor one year, my mother became a song leader as a teenage camper. She often picked musical rounds in which the girls, divided
into groups, sang the same melody, beginning the song at different times so their voices layered to create a dense texture woven with harmonies and echoes, as in “Frère Jacques” or “Hear the Lively Song.” She especially loved the French round “Le Carillon de Vendôme” for the way its sonorous vowels sounded like the rich pealing of cathedral bells. Her favorite round was a humorous onomatopoeic composition in which the girls simultaneously spoke, rather than sung, three phrases. The first group repeated: “potatoes, potatoes, potatoes”; the second: “tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes”; and the third: “fried bacon, fried bacon, fried bacon.” As the campers chanted, their words seemed to free themselves from their meanings and—transformed—morphed into the vibrant, nocturnal chorus of an echoing frog pond.

  It’s also possible my mother repeats her stories due to the gothic nature of her early childhood. From ages four through six she lived with her parents and little sister Becky in a brick house on the grounds of Austin State Hospital while my grandfather completed his residency, from 1950 to 1952. The psychiatric hospital, formerly called the Texas State Lunatic Asylum, stretched in a series of low brick buildings and was surrounded by a high cyclone fence. In a gravel cul-de-sac just outside of the chain link stood four identical one-story houses provided by the hospital to medical residents and their families: two structures on either side of the road. The cul-de-sac dead-ended at the edge of a wide cornfield, walling off the odd, miniature suburb and providing a sort of forest in which the children could play. And as if to reinforce the mirror image, half the houses held couples with children and the other half without. The Legget family had three children; the two oldest were Becky’s and my mother’s exact ages. And coincidentally, my mother and her neighborhood playmate also shared the same name: Cindy.

  The two Cindys like to crawl into the wooden doghouse belonging to Duchess, my mother’s fat, ice cream–loving dachshund, and play tea party using Cindy Legget’s fluted white china set with the mock-silver spoons. From where the girls sat in the backyard doghouse sipping tap water from their cups, their ladylike pinkie fingers sticking straight out, they could hear periodic hoots and wails washing downwind from the nearby women’s ward. At one point, a patient escaped from the men’s ward and wandered loose through the hospital grounds, sending the whole place into lockdown. My grandparents forbade my mother and Becky from playing in the cornfield, saying that the confused patient could be crouched between the tall stalks, waiting to pull them in. When I asked my mother if the staff ever caught the escaped patient, she paused and said she didn’t know. “How can you not know?” I asked. “I was four,” she said, shrugging. She was finally allowed back into the thicket of stalks, listening for rattlesnakes as she shimmied her way through the corn, keeping her house safely within sight.

  One night, after my grandparents had left for a dinner party in town, my mother and Becky went to bed and their babysitter, sixteen-year-old Aunt Jeannette (their father’s baby sister), sat in the living room, reading. Several hours later, while the kids slept, a man broke into the house, tied Jeannette up with panty hose he found in the master bedroom, and rifled through my grandmother’s jewelry box. He managed to slip out the back door when he heard my grandparents pull into the driveway. As they entered the house, Jeannette jerked her head in the direction of the fleeing burglar, and my grandfather raced toward the door as my grandmother darted down the hall to the children’s room.

  Soon, Becky and my mother sat on a pink quilt my grandmother had spread across the Leggets’ front yard as the manhunt began. My mother recalls a posse of men scouring the hospital grounds as they carried shotguns against their shoulders—one of the gunslinging volunteers scuttling around shirtless, in his underwear. She kept hearing the word “burglar” echoing from the men’s mouths—a word she didn’t yet know. Her “burglar,” she imagined, must be a monster made from fistfuls of hamburger meat, who prowled the neighborhood in his raw, pink flesh, looking for little girls to eat.

  My own favorite monster from childhood was the Troll King from “Peer Gynt,” who makes the lazy, ragamuffin farmer, Peer, drink sour pig’s mead and attach a green tail to his bottom to prove he’s prepared to marry the troll princess. In my edition of the fairy tale, the illustrator, Paul Bonner, had given the Troll King wild white hair and a gourd-shaped nose that shone like greenish brass. My mother would read the part where the Troll King calls for Peer’s death—after the insolent Norwegian mocks the king’s daughter’s harp playing—with an imperial roar: “Dash him to bits upon the rocks!” She’d pitch her voice higher to conjure the petulant, adolescent troll chorus, giddily clamoring for Peer’s blood: “May we not torment him first, Your Majesty?”

  “Cindy Hanes is a most attractive young lady of 23, who is currently appearing at the Jackson Little Theatre in their production of ‘Harvey,’” writes Loy Moncrief, a local actor and business manager for the Theater Center, in a clipping from the Jackson Daily News, which my grandmother had saved and pasted into a scrapbook. Moncrief’s article about my mother’s role as a nurse in Mary Chase’s comedy of errors, Harvey, simmers with a certain genteel, period-style sexism that both amuses me and makes me squirm. In the article “Dumb, Beautiful Nurse In ‘Harvey’ Only Half Typecast” (August 28, 1970), Moncrief writes: “In the role of Miss Kelley she is the, [sic] ‘dum [sic] but beautiful’ nurse at Chumley’s Rest (a psychiatric treatment center). Miss Hanes is certainly beautiful, but not in the least dumb, though she is certainly adept at appearing so on stage.” In the accompanying photograph my glamorous, dark-haired mother wears a crisp white nurse’s uniform and pointed cap as she grips the elbow of Cliff Bingham, the middle-aged actor who starred as Elwood P. Dowd, the play’s main character who hallucinates a six-foot-tall rabbit named Harvey. She’s made her radiant, canny smile appear dopey and a bit dazed, and she tilts her head coyly toward Bingham.

  During one performance of Harvey, my mother recalls that the actor (a local TV weatherman) who played the doctor at the sanitarium to which Elwood gets committed suddenly froze mid-scene, forgetting his lines—he “went up,” as theater folks say—and she had to improvise some dialogue in order to keep the story going.

  Moncrief summarizes my mother’s background as follows:

  Cindy is not a native Mississippian. She was born in Galveston, Texas. She moved around quite a bit in her early childhood. Her family lived in Texas, California and Louisiana until the time she was in the seventh grade. At that point her Father [sic] (who is a prominent psychiatrist in Jackson) moved the family to Jackson, because he wanted to work on the newly forming psychiatric department at the University Medical Center.

  He also mentions that during her senior year at Mississippi State College for Women, my mother was elected president of her school’s chapter of the Alpha Psi Omega Honorary Dramatics Fraternity, and lists several of her appearances in collegiate and community theater productions: “‘J.B.,’ ‘Something Unspoken,’ ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘The Miracle Worker,’ ‘First Lady,’ ‘Lilliom,’ and ‘The Time of the Cuckoo,’ among others.” She’s told me that her favorite roles were the drunken Italian maid, Giovanna, in Arthur Laurents’s The Time of the Cuckoo, for which she trained with an Italian language coach and received a Sammy Award for Best Cameo Actress, and the elusive White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. My mother’s first community theater role, while she was still in high school, was a small part as a young blind girl in William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker in which her own father (a bearded, bespectacled doctor) played the doctor (bearded, bespectacled) who delivers the blind and deaf infant Helen Keller. His one line: “She’ll live.”

  “She loves singing as well as acting,” Moncrief notes of my mother. He then quotes her directly: “‘My singing career was cut short when I had a small malignancy removed from my throat a couple of years ago. But my voice is getting stronger and I’m regaining my confidence in it.’”

  My mother had told me about her cancer. After her father noticed a lump on her throat
and took her the next day to see the head of endocrinology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, she was diagnosed, at twenty-two, with a malignant tumor on her thyroid gland. Surgeons removed sixty percent of her thyroid, along with a parathyroid gland and a lymph node. She’d never mentioned to me, however, the operation’s effect on her voice or that she’d envisioned for herself a professional singing career.