by Dan Noble
“Tell them,” Mother would say.
At least I felt special then. No one in that room knew Mother took this show seriously. None of them suspected she was up to something the way I did—even if I didn’t know exactly what. I would tell them, in my frilly dress with its floral sash, that Jane Eyre is forever entangled with the rear-facing back of our Volvo station wagon, and Robinson Crusoe with the small electrics department of Bloomingdale’s Lexington Avenue. I’d heard Mother recount my performances, and these were proud words she used. I didn’t understand them all but I sounded lovely when she spoke of me that way.
This was all before the divorce, and of course, I never noticed how this act drove my father out of the conversation. I just listed off these book/life associations and soaked up the attention. “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret and spaghetti carbonara,” I would say, eventually getting the dramatic pause right. “Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Intercourse, at the Pennsylvania Dutch Country.” When my parents split, I figured, eventually, this kind of talk is what drove him permanently from the conversation.
Our flashy neighbors and the trio my father referred to as Mother’s holdover hippie college friends laughed into a cloud of menthol cigarette smoke and started to sing out their own pairings. When the comments became more obviously inappropriate for a girl my age, Mother assumed I wouldn’t understand, and chortled along with “Anais Nin and furry handcuffs,” shooting me barely a glance over her gin and tonic.
But even if the Intercourse double entendre was over my head, I sensed what this last comment meant. By ten, I’d read the slim volume with the bow-topped, mary-janed girl on the cover, and terrifyingly, felt my body respond. Books had taught me everything. Even—if I’d noticed, which was hard to do in the shadow of Mother—why someone like my father would be hunched awkwardly in the corner, fumbling with the pull-tab of his Budweiser. Alienation is a novelist’s pet theme.
I didn’t understand, but it certainly made Mother happy. And back then, that made everyone happy. Even my alienated father—for a while anyway. He either didn’t understand enough to question or knew enough not to. I couldn’t work it out. I didn’t want to. But later, I understood how he felt being on the outside.
Nothing was as it seemed. My father used to say to me, “Some of us don’t have the luxury of being depressed,” though he’d never dare say that to Mother, and it made me hate him a little when he tried the phrase on my ears, even as Mother’s talk of reality and grounding books into the real world infuriated me. I wasn’t getting it, clearly. Whatever It was. And she was losing respect for me, I could tell. Little things like cooking foods I didn’t like or forgetting to tell me when she’d be gone for several days. I tried to be tough—just look at what Crusoe had survived!
And then Mother tried to kill herself. The first suicide attempt, when Mother swallowed her Prozac supply and nodded off reading her favorite Lorrie Moore short fiction was different than her second attempt. I remember my fifteen-year-old-self thinking bravo, how well you’ve grounded that book forever in our lives, Mother.
Leading to that first time, she’d spent days of her life trying to work out how a writer could be so articulate, could get everything so beautifully, painfully, right. There’d been an excess of disappointment in my inability to get how one would ground their reading into reality, and of course, my pathetic attempts to explain how I knew what was real. And then there she was, the print transferred onto her face where she’d let the book rest, her vomit adhering the words to her in a whole new way. This seemed to answer both of her insistent questions at once. Would she have tried to kill herself just for my benefit? It was quite a spectacle. A terrifying one.
If my marvelous friend Angie, who was always troublingly attached to Mother, and I had found her—our mouths agape—even seconds later, she’d have died then and there. The vomit had blocked most of her airway.
“You saved her life, girls,” the EMT with the immaculately groomed goatee had said to us as we rode along to the hospital; he called her puking emesis and patted our backs hard in a reassuring way. Still, my best friend and I weren’t convinced. Though she wouldn’t say, Angie looked angry at Mother, while I thought her disappointment in me, and in compensation, our schemes at enlivening post-divorce Mother had not only been a failure, but perhaps had landed her here. How many times had she asked, “Just leave me alone girls, please?”
Was the whole wordsmithing and narrative structure thing just a mania? Something to focus her intellect and hyperactivity on? The psychological manifestation of the depression of a failed writer? It couldn’t be: one look at her office, the compelling flow charts of one theory giving way to another, the incredible concordances, and that was clear to me.
After the divorce and before the first suicide, when I spent hours hovering over her, drinking ginger ale through bending straws and trying to beg her off the sofa, she’d say, “Millie, show, don’t tell.” I already knew the basics of fiction craft, though I couldn’t name off the full fifty states. Mother had a book in her. I grew up knowledgeable of that fact. “If only we could medically remove it,” my father said to me in confidence after he let me pull the ring on his Budweiser for that satisfying carbon discharge.
But going over those days, which she spent lying in bed or watching reruns of The Love Boat, it felt she couldn’t have been clearer if she’d tried. I was her last hope at happiness, and I was a failure. In turn, I saw what I wanted her to be and I’d rant, pointlessly ticking off items on my own agenda,.
“Why don’t you just get up and do something?” I’d yell. “And how about drinking some juice instead of ginger ale for a change?” What an example I was setting sliding my own Canada Dry can behind my back.
I’d show Mother by dancing the tango while sipping cranberry juice out of one of the Star Wars glasses from Burger King—usually the Princess Liea—and Mother would actually laugh. More satisfying than the Budweiser carbon discharge. God, I loved to hear her shocking guffaw. These are the moments I try to hold onto.
“I’ll say one thing for you, you’ve got a wonderful sense of humor,” she said once, as if it were a magnificent gift. In my darker moments, I still treasure that compliment. Sometimes she’d cry a little after and say, “Get your old mom a tissue, would you?” Like I really touched her with my humor.
I’d carry the tissue like a knight’s sword, but I’d wonder why my humor, if it was so wonderful, wasn’t enough. Was there anything I could ever show that would be enough? No. It would never be enough for her. I began to score the number of times I could be of assistance to Mother alongside the number of times Angie could. I didn’t like the results. Angie understood the books much more than I did. “Exactly!” Mother often said of Angie’s take on a metaphor, or a turn of phrase. I began to see why people discussed the similarities between love and hate.
Mother lived after the first suicide attempt, but no longer was she the woman who’d fallen asleep reading of a faded starlet in a Midwestern motel who somehow touched the tender spot of Mother’s own troubles.
Somewhere in the transaction—the reading, the pills, the vomit, the crossing over, the crossing back—Mother had abandoned her depression, like a duffle bag left behind on a train platform. Now she was a ball of energy. I should have been happy for her, but really, I wanted to take that book and shred it. I knew it was somehow to blame. But how?
How could a book, pages printed with words, albeit articulate words, but words all the same, be to blame? You’re thinking too black and white, Millie. But I couldn’t get my mind around how.
I should have been thrilled to leave all that behind. But without it, I had to get to know her all over again. And not in the way Angie and I had hoped during all those years plying her with outlandish proposals for aerobic activity.
It was as if without her books Mother was nothing. Perhaps the worst surprise of all though, was that she didn’t seem to need me in the way she had. I could stay in my room all day, smoking cigarettes I
pretended to want and like, and she wouldn’t notice my absence. I took it to mean she’d given up on my understanding her book world. She would no longer bother trying.
Suddenly my father’s catchphrase took on a new sense: “Beware a well-read woman” he used to say when Mother said the thing about carrying a book. I’d never understood, and to compensate, I’d laughed. Surely a woman and a book was nothing but harmless. Just look at all those men with their guns, Mother used to say. And that made sense to me. But once she began to exclude me so completely, I couldn’t help but feel there was something sinister afoot. But what?
After the second botched “suicide,” the one that took her speech, Mother was transferred far from our Long Island home to New Jersey General Hospital’s psychiatric wing, where she’d spent time after the divorce and again after the first suicide. Thirty days into this latest sentence, stumped by her loss of speech, and my threats for the questionable ethics of their treatments, the doctors released a silent Mother into my custody. Despite the doctor’s insistence, I simply couldn’t buy that she was doing this on purpose. Surely she wouldn’t cut me off so severely?
I’ll never forget the way she looked sitting in my passenger seat, her hands folded on her lap, waiting for me to strap her in, as if this type of thing—an ordinary car ride—was no longer a part of her world, as if she could completely cut me and everything that came along with me out of the world she inhabited.
Still, I couldn’t help myself and kissed her on the cheek after I’d leaned through the open door to click the belt. She looked at me and smiled. It was the last time she’d do so. I sometimes wake up screaming to this image of her, clear as day. It was the most dismissive smile. The kind you’d flash at a simpleton you felt sorry for.
At first it was nerve-wracking, the silence. There were days so quiet, I’d forget I could speak myself. Every sound became a feature: the crunch of a chip, the tinkle of a fork. I wanted to hate her. What the fuck was she doing to our lives?
But I’d catch a glimpse of her through her office door, once again so studious with her blackboards swirled with connective charts—tying all her reading into such meaningful looking flows—and her books, and I felt overwhelmingly that she was being the only person she could be. But that didn’t stop me beginning to hate her for it.
I hated her for not sharing whatever it all meant with me. But her passion glowed, and it was impossible to think of her in the same way as other people. She was here, but she wasn’t. Sometimes I wondered if she was real. And then her question would come to me: how do you know what’s real, Millie? If you bleed when I cut you, I’d think. But such thoughts scared me and I tried hard not to have them.
Angie handled it differently. To her, Mother’s silence was reverential. She studied Mother’s boards, often copying them long-hand. “It’s a test, to see what we can understand on our own,” Angie would say.
“You’re drinking the Kool Aid,” I’d say because this looked desperate to me, and in contrast, I swore off my curiosity. Pretended to shut it down completely.
“Isn’t your mother expecting you?” I’d often say to her. It felt more like Angie was there for Mother than for me most days, and my anger amplified. Once, I locked the front door and didn’t let her in. I sat on the other side in tears throughout her banging. She was, after all, the last person I had.
And when she finally retreated down the driveway, I was sorry. I loved Angie, and it wasn’t her fault she understood Mother better than I did. I didn’t always hate her, and I certainly didn’t admit it, despite Dr. Samuels, my therapist, advising me it was okay to do so. I’d repeat that to myself a lot later on. It is okay to hate. “You don’t know her,” I’d say.
“But you do,” he said. And eventually, this made me consider the ways in which I, as witness, might translate Mother’s experience. My senses engorged, for the first time, I felt I wielded some power.
Unlike the inertia following the first suicide, Mother now had me drive her to rare bookshops, whose addresses she’d rip out of the Yellow Pages and circle in runny black pen. She’d schlep a tote bag to the library in some of her old Parisian getups—all this action, so different from her years on the sofa—and I’d purposefully try to ignore her scanning the card catalogs. Sometimes I rolled my eyes and fingered the crazy person rings at my head.
What book was she looking for? Whatever it was, she didn’t seem to find it. I’d see her leafing to, it seemed, a specific point in the books she perused. It took only seconds for her to reject volumes as if there were a detail she was after that was clearly there or not.
Always, she’d come out deflated and empty handed. After such a trip, I once drove to The Olde Ice Cream Parlor—the one with the old Singer sewing machine tables where you could pump the iron foot pedal while you waited for your root beer float.
When I pulled the car to a stop in front, I thought I’d done something right. This, I took from her assessing gaze. But when I turned the car off, she wouldn’t budge.
“What? What did I get? Please don’t tell me we’ve been searching these shops for my benefit.”
Nothing.
I reached into the tote bag in front of her to see what book she’d just purchased: Wuthering Heights. I had read this over a hot-fudge sundae here years ago, then donated it to a used-book store down the street. Did she care or was she fucking with me? The familiar feel of the cover immediately turned my head to the ice cream parlor window. Tears welled, my hand trembled, and I turned more completely away from her, tucked my hand aside my thigh. I wouldn’t let her see my emotions.
We had driven to this colonial Massachusetts town a couple times every summer. Mother loved the romance of it. Dad liked the lake. I loved the ice cream shop’s sewing machine pedals. My father and I would race them.
It still stung, the abandonment—from both of them.
Still in the car, I looked at the window seat where we’d sat inside. The pane was grimy, but there was a family sitting there and it looked so much like me at ten years old. I could only see the parents’ legs, but I swear it could have been us. Ground your reading in reality.
I hurried inside. But those seats were empty. How could that be? The woman sat Mother and me there. And yet, I could feel the presence of that other family. I half expected to reach out and hold my father’s calloused hand. The experience was beautiful, significant, like the book itself.
All through our hot fudge sundaes, mint chip and coffee scoops with no cherries, I wondered, could that version of us exist somehow? Was this finally what Mother had been on about? I shook it off. I sounded just as crazy as her. The rest of the time we sat with our books open. This was my copy of Wuthering Heights. My name was in it, penned in my earliest cursive. From the first sentence, I was drawn into the romance of the possibility that maybe there was something more, maybe something magical to what Mother did with books. It certainly seemed to tick all the boxes of her questions. Even while I explored the enchantment of this notion, I spewed prosaic hatred at her.
“Why did you buy my own book, Mother? I read it here, yes. But so what? What could that possibly matter now that you’ve ruined everything for us?” I regretted the angry words I hurled at her. It was infuriating to live with someone so reactionless. And on that day, it got the best of me. I felt my anger flare. For her refusal to be out with it, or my failure to get it, I couldn’t tell. Mostly, I felt they were becoming one in the same.
More often, I began tugging at the threads of that possibility of magic, of a larger plan and meaning to it all. As the story goes, God created his world in seven days, beginning with light and then supplementing that with birds, sea creatures, and man. Now Mother was creating hers—using the best stories as a portal. Why not? It made more and more sense. Why else would she have lived the life she did? Treated me the way she did? Mother was a genius none of us could deal with, who’d discovered a wormhole in the universe through which books were the entry. I said this drunk at keg parties. Everyone laughed. Y
ou should be a writer, they said.
It’s a big ask to believe in a point where fiction and fact overlap unless you witness it for yourself. It’s a ridiculous amount to take in—especially when we’re programmed to develop precisely along the opposite logic route: give up make-believe for the real world. I gleaned that from one of her science of creativity books.
Believers most often begin as disbelievers. I might say it takes one to know one. That’s why the experience is so important. If I merely told the facts of this story, nobody would believe it. Show, don’t tell. Yes, Mother. For Christ’s sake, I get it. Finally, I get it.
But after all those years of shredding tissues in the cheap halogen light of the very expensive behavioral therapy office, trying to tamp my hope of her return, I convinced myself to stop believing. I clung to that therapist’s striated, cigarette-choked words with everything I had. Otherwise, how could I move forward with the lonely, prosaic life I had left?
Instead, therapy gave me this: imagine your worst fear comes true and live with it. That is the survival skill I mastered thousands of dollars later—the way to concentrate on the bits of life that allow you to go on living. It’s far more difficult than it sounds. And often, dangerous—living each moment as if it not only may be, but is, your last, and still going on with the mundane tasks of brushing your teeth and catching the train. Ignore how it feels. Once it’s mastered this tactic is quite a relief.
Later, as a mother myself, I swore there was only one thing I’d never risk: losing myself in the obsession’s Mother had instilled in me. Because once down that road, there was no turning back; just look where it led her. I wouldn’t do that to my daughter. Never. But we don’t really know what we’ll do until we’re shoved against that brick wall.
