by 72 Hour Hold
“Well, Clyde, that’s your lot in life. You make women want to argue. You have to admit I’m not the only one.”
“I could say the same thing about you.”
It was true enough to make us both laugh.
“I guess we’re just difficult people,” Clyde said.
“I’m not difficult; I’m misunderstood,” I said. Clyde cracked up once again. “Trina is fine.”
Trina is here, Clyde, I’ll get her for you. That’s what I should have said, knowing that for Clyde and me civility is a rainbow that fades almost as soon as it appears. But I’d never learned to break away quickly from the man I’d promised to live with forever; that, of course, was my problem, not his.
Frances rose quietly and closed the door.
“Did she get the birthday check?” His volume went up; it always did when he spoke of money he was spending. He wanted anyone in earshot to know that he was capable of paying.
“Yes, Clyde. That check is already spent.” I could feel a surge of familiar anger. Clyde wrote checks and left me to do the heavy lifting.
“That quick? She couldn’t have gotten it more than two days ago. Damn.”
“Like father, like daughter,” I said.
I’d been Clyde’s first wife. Not exactly a childhood sweetheart but close enough. After me came the trophy blonde, Miss Gone-in-a-Flash-with-the-Cash herself. I had tried to tell the fool that white women don’t leave the way sisters do. None of that “all I want is my peace of mind.” She did a strip club on his bank account, and my child support was shaky for about two years. Then he came all the way back, overcompensated for wife number two by marrying the Sapphire of all Sapphires. Miss Body was a brickhouse: double Ds, big behind, shapely legs. Clyde was totally sprung. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—at first. But the centerfold had a split personality. Evilene would go off in a New York minute. When she started acting like she was getting ready to put her hands on Trina, I knew her days with Clyde and maybe on this earth were numbered. Now there was Aurelia, an elegant beauty with enough street in her to keep Clyde in line. She treated Trina kindly. For the first time, I felt replaced.
Trina’s here, Clyde. I’ll get her for you. Why couldn’t I just say that? But if I knew how to quit with Clyde while I was ahead, I’d probably die of boredom. He’d been the outlet for my aggressive tendencies for quite a while.
“Well, I want her to have nice things.”
“The nicest thing you could give her is more time.”
I could hear him bristling on the other end. Clyde always chose offense over defense.
“You still have her in that program?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Trina’s mind, Keri. She was smoking too much weed and she got paranoid; that’s all that happened. Then you go and put her in a psychiatric hospital like she’s some crazy person.”
“Your daughter has been diagnosed with a mental illness.”
Clyde sputtered and choked. “I don’t believe that shit. Half these doctors don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”
The weariness in Clyde’s voice dismayed me. I was used to his mouthing off, being opinionated. Our fights were legendary, hard, long, below the belt, and bloody. We thrived on hot words and slammed doors, at least I did. As long as we fought, a part of Clyde still belonged to me.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m okay.” There was a long pause that he didn’t fill in.
“Trina’s here. I’ll get her for you.”
I heard Trina say “Daddy!”—the name a gleeful exclamation, a shriek of delight, in the manner of girls who worship their fathers as much as they love them. I’d never experienced that kind of idolatry. By the time I was two, my father was dead from a motorcycle accident. By three, my memories of him had faded, and by five he was no more to me than a smiling picture under glass. As I grew, my father’s absence became normal, like church on Sunday. It was my mother’s detachment that stung like acid flung against my skin.
Oh, those beautiful mommies, just out of reach, removed and aloof because they lack the maternal gene, because they love their jobs, some no-good man, their reflections in the mirror, or the afterglow from the bottle or the hallucination from the pipe more than they love their children. Daughters can worship their mothers too. When I was a child, my mother was in and out of my life and mostly drunk in both locations. I wanted to be important to her, only that. To matter more than the next drink. It’s amazing what people squander in a lifetime, what they walk away from as though it’s just so much detritus in the street. I remember trying to hold on to my last bit of hope, how it seeped out just before I gave up on my mother. I stored my pain and anger in a place that became molten. And now I had to live with heat that wouldn’t stay contained.
Trina was giggling. Clyde used to make me laugh too. When we were newlyweds with brand-new dreams, we laughed all the time. Driving through Atlanta, where we started out, Clyde would point out the site of our first mansion, our second. Stick with me, baby, and you’ll be farting in a Rolls. I don’t need a mansion or a Rolls, I told him. But he did.
Trina caught my eye, gave me a look, and I got up and walked outside, closing the door behind me. Not all the way, though. I left it open a crack and stood right there. Trina’s laughter wafted out. I heard her say she was fine.
I had to give the man some credit. Clyde showed up for the important occasions: the birthdays, the holidays. He called. He had never been late with child support, except after his second divorce. When we were together, he did almost as much child care as I did. In between chasing down dollar bills, Clyde was a real daddy. Trina caressed the word, cooed, and giggled some more after she said it. If anybody said my name that way, I’d never leave her. But then, he hadn’t left Trina. He left me.
My inner mule made me marry Clyde. That was one time God warned me big time. Minutes before the ceremony began, while I was standing outside the church getting ready to march down the aisle and say I do, a pigeon flew over my head, veered dangerously close, and shit right on my veil. Ma Missy was next to me, her bright clairvoyant eyes fevered with insight garnered from one look in her personal crystal ball. Between clenched teeth she whispered, “Babygirl, that’s Jesus talking to you. You need to put your ass right back in that limo and get the hell on away from here.”
She read my glance.
“Okay, don’t listen to me. I got to seventy-five with all my teeth and in my complete right mind being a fool. This is your world, squirrel; I’m just living in it.” She shook her head. “So damn hardheaded.”
It wasn’t that my grandmother didn’t like Clyde; she just realized early on that he was a man intent on moving up so fast he’d leave behind whoever didn’t keep up.
When I peeked into the office, Frances was dabbing more spot remover on the stain. “Don’t want to come out,” she muttered. She put her hand to her face, partially covering a scar on her cheek that she tended to rub when she was troubled. It had become a keloid. That smooth raised skin stood out like a brand.
I returned to the showroom. Trina and Adriana were both helping customers. Adriana rang up hers first and then came over to me.
“So, I understand you have a movie date.”
Adriana nodded.
“Who’s the guy?”
“Some dude in my class.”
“Do you like him?”
Adriana shrugged, her movement full of tough-girl bravado. She didn’t want to care. Then, just as quickly as it had been erected, the wall came down. “It doesn’t matter if I like him or not. You know that.”
She was back to being sad girl again. I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her tightly. “Just have a good time,” I said.
Trina was helping several customers. As I watched her, I recalled how she used to work in the shop every day after high school. A bright, clear-eyed young girl, she had made the customers laugh with her wise-cracks and sheer ebullience. She’s still got most of
that, I told myself, and what’s missing will return. She’s not so far behind she can’t catch up. She’ll go to college in the fall, go on to graduate school, get a great job, and meet a nice guy, an understanding go-getter. Everything will work out fine.
“Ready to go?” I asked her when her customer went to the cash register.
“Where?”
“I was thinking home. We have to put the flowers in water.”
“Aww.”
I sighed. “Where do you want to go, Trina?”
“To the movies, to the mall, to eat.”
When Trina was in her early teens, she would jump out of a moving car in order to avoid being seen going into a movie with me. That was when she had friends who called, who met her at the mall, who spent the night and filled her bedroom with whispers and laughter and boys’ names. She had been robbed of that casual happiness. I wanted to make up for that void, to fill in the empty spaces until she recovered all she’d lost.
There were moments, right before my world began to tip over again, that I don’t want to forget. Simple, normal minutes, the sun bright, the breeze drying the dampness between my breasts, the clock ticking, nothing special. We took the flowers home, and I put them into water. We drove to the marina and saw a movie, a comedy that made us grab each other as we convulsed, and then had an early dinner at a Thai restaurant before returning home. Trina took her evening pill, and we sat in the hot tub in our backyard and drank lemonade. It grew dark as our legs bumped against each other in the warm water. The stars, at least those that were visible, came out. In LA, it’s easier to see planes than stars. When I’m missing Atlanta, a lot of times I’m thinking about cold winter nights, me scurrying home under a sky filled with stars. But even in LA, I could make out the North Star, with its steady glow. It’s bright like a plane, only it never moves.
The last thing I did before I retired was to count Trina’s pills and subtract the days that had passed from the original number. Counting pills had become a way of life. Even though she’d been well for five months, I took nothing for granted. My old instincts hadn’t yet dulled. The old fears hadn’t completely receded. One more week to go before a refill; there were twenty-one of the pink three-times-a-day pills and seven nighttime white ones. I counted once again, to make sure; then I put the cap back on the bottle and breathed.
During the night Trina climbed in the bed with me, and I pulled her close, wishing she could be a baby again in my arms. No, inside me. We would start over; even my milk would be new. If only I’d known then what I knew now: everything that could turn a gift from God into a tragedy. I knew where the road turned slippery and treacherous and the baby fell out of the car seat. Women would kill for what I know.
Babies should come with instructions taped to the soles of their little feet. A cheery note from God: Be careful! This child is accident-prone. Or: Lucky you! This one goes straight to the top! How about: Congratulations! You have just given birth to a natural beauty, who will never know acne or need braces or diets. Your darling straight-A student will be a pleasure, an endless source of pride and joy right up to high school graduation, and then she’ll hit a wall of craziness that may never end. Take lots of before pictures. After will be unphotographable.
As I said, the end of that day was unremarkable. Nothing really stood out. Everything flowed, the kind of flow you take for granted when your shackles have been removed, the scars from the last beating have all faded, and it’s Sunday on the plantation. But I did pray. I will always pray. This is what I prayed: Mother Father God, let the healing continue.
2
TRINA GAVE ME A KISS WHEN I DROPPED HER OFF AT THE Weitz Center two weeks later, on a Wednesday morning. Watching her as she ran up the stairway to the five-story building, I didn’t drive off until the thick glass door closed behind her. The Weitz Center was part of Beth Israel Hospital, the Beverly Hills medical behemoth, renowned for innovative patient care and VIP rooms. In another wing I’d had my uterus and two useless ovaries removed when Trina was nine, which didn’t end my yearning to bear another child, only the possibility. An ER doctor had stitched up Trina’s bleeding foot after a bicycle accident when she was fifteen. In that case, I’d passed by two other hospitals on the way to Beth Israel, which was, in my estimation, one of the finest.
In those early years I’d thought of hospitals as places to mend bodies. But that was before a broken mind had rampaged through my life. The Weitz Center was a place to heal brains. From nine to three, Monday through Friday, Trina had group sessions and individual counseling on the first floor. She’d been attending the partial program, outpatient therapy for people with psychiatric disorders, ever since her third hospitalization, almost six months ago. Her three hospitalizations had run together during the previous summer and fall after Trina had graduated from high school just after her seventeenth birthday. Graduation summer, her teenage rebellion had exploded into one manic episode after another, a nightmare summer of long nights, smashed glass, and broken dreams.
In the beginning, it was like being suspicious of a husband. Those little pinprick inklings tickled the inside of my skull. I explained everything away until I couldn’t. The reason he was gone all the time was because he was working; the reason she talked so fast was because she was excitable, emotional. The reason he didn’t reach for me at night was because he was tired from working so hard. The reason she couldn’t sleep at night was because she was so wound up from studying. None of her old friends came around anymore because—well, people outgrow each other. The silence at the dinner table, the quiet in our bedroom— he was preoccupied with his work. All the speeding tickets? Didn’t all young people speed? The spending sprees? That was my fault. I never should have let Trina have a credit card. But then she cursed at me. His silences grew deeper. How could she say those things? Baby, what’s going on? Trina, what’s wrong?
Years before, Clyde had told me, “There’s nobody else; there’s just no us.”
With Trina I drew my own conclusions: My child is sick.
I waded through quicksand to get to those words. It was up to my neck when I finally spoke them aloud.
“Your daughter is bipolar, also known as manic-depressive,” the doctor at the second hospital had told me. That was at UCLA last August, a week before she was scheduled to leave for Brown University. I had taken her there after Trina began telling me that I was a devil who had stolen her from her real mother. I sat with her in admittance and told the clerk that my child needed psychiatric care. I whispered the words, but they came out of my mouth all the same.
“Are you her mother?” the clerk asked.
“Yes.”
“Is she under eighteen?”
“Yes.”
She looked up from the paper she was filling out. “That’s good.”
The woman checked our insurance, and then she found a bed for Trina in the psychiatric ward on the nonacute side. When I returned the next day, I demanded a psychological evaluation. When she’d been sent to the Weitz Center for her first hospitalization in June, the psychiatrist had told me it was too early to tell what was wrong with her. But this was the second time. I had to know. The UCLA doctor was Russian, his accent thick. His words bewildered me. I asked him to repeat what he’d said.
“Ms. Whitmore, your daughter is bipolar.”
That was the scariest part, the way he said it. She is bipolar, not she has bipolar disorder. You are cancer. You are AIDS. Nobody ever said that.
“How long before she gets better?”
“Woman,” the doctor said, not unkindly, “don’t set your clock.”
I’d almost had her hospitalized during the Christmas break when she was in eleventh grade—but for drugs, not psychosis. My ex-boyfriend and I had returned from the movies. When we drove up to my house, every light was turned on and music was blaring. Inside I found Trina wearing one of my cocktail dresses. Her face was a garish rainbow: silver eye shadow, red lips, pink cheeks. She was heading for the door.
“Whoa,” I said. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“You can’t stop me, Demon Queen.”
She began screaming, and when I listened to what she was saying— calling me a devil, accusing me of killing her real mother, themes she would return to again and again—I became alarmed. My ex-boyfriend and I tried to settle her down.
“What are you on?” I asked her over and over. Her answer was more screaming and cursing.
Ex-boyfriend and I drove straight to the hospital, but when the attendant suggested that her problem might be mental, I balked.
“My daughter doesn’t have a mental problem,” I told him.
By that time, Trina had calmed down so much that when the emergency room physician said he didn’t see anything wrong, I was ready to believe him. Keep an eye on her for the next forty-eight hours, he told me. On the way back, Trina apologized for her outburst, swore she hadn’t taken anything, explained she hadn’t been sleeping well because she was studying so hard for midterms. It was a plausible excuse; that’s what I told myself.
This junior year holiday episode was but a shadow of the post–high school graduation episode that landed her in UCLA. That night in August she seemed to be floating on a jet stream of hallucinatory energy that punctuated her every word. Around four o’clock that morning I awoke to her footsteps, kitchen cabinet doors slamming shut, music playing in her room, television voices that were way too loud. She began calling people on the telephone and had dozens of disjointed conversations, one right after another, as though she were frightened of being without a connection. Later, there were soft thuds as she ran down the back stairs into the kitchen, then more slamming, shutting, opening of drawers, cabinets, the refrigerator. After a while I smelled food. When I came downstairs, I found ten cold pancakes, lopsided from syrup and butter, piled on a plate.
Days before, I’d pulled two joints from her purse. I had screamed at her then, a frantic tirade; she cursed me. By that time, most of our conversations had deteriorated into verbal beat-downs, Thrillas in Manilas, with Trina as Ali to my tongue-tied Frazier. So I already knew something was terribly wrong. For the rest of the day, she stayed in her room. For at least eight hours, the light on her phone didn’t go out for more than two minutes. That light mesmerized and terrorized, like a whip dangling from ol’ massa’s hand.
