by Laurie Fox
I’d accepted his offer of lunch in the ship’s mess because one never refuses a meal from Chez Panisse. “Food’s good,” I said cautiously. “I’m just not crazy about the company.” I stabbed the last triangle of quattro formaggio pizza with my fork. “In fact, what am I doing here?”
“I see your point,” he said impassively.
“You do?” I said, and popped the paper-thin crust in my mouth.
“Indeed, I do. You feel that you have no truck with men like me. That men like me are scum, or worse, undesirable.”
I had to laugh. Espresso dribbled down one corner of my mouth.
“I can’t take you anywhere,” Hook observed, wiping my cheek with a paper napkin.
“Not true,” I said. “You’ve taken me aboard this ship.” Out a porthole on my right I saw a gardenlike isle looming in the distance. But it was not The Neverland—it was the Rock, Alcatraz, that legendary lockup for lifers, birdmen, and other miscreants. “We are in the San Francisco Bay?” I asked.
“Right you are again,” Hook said. “And I don’t see you resisting me.” He lowered his stringy body into the chair across from me.
“Well, that’s because I’m drugged. No way would I just come with you.”
“Where there’s a way, there’s a will,” he sang.
“Bite me!” I said.
“How much you sound like Berry. Like mother like daughter, like daughter like daughter,” he said. “Actually, I’ve no interest in biting you. I’m a gentleman, not a vampire. Your head must be stuck in some other story.”
Hook was right: I was stuck. Neither transported to Neverland nor caught in a dream, I was an adult who’d gone missing in her own backyard—with some ridiculous villain I had manifested.
Pleased with himself, Hook set a mouthwatering flan before me on the table. How I longed to pound it with my fists, to watch the stiff custard fly.
“See, I’m not such a baddy,” he said. “I’m a fun guy. A regular Joe.”
“Hardly.” I scowled.
“Have we forgotten everything?” he said, raising his voice. “There is always a bit of Pan in Hook, and a bit of Hook in Pan—or hadn’t you noticed?”
My heart stopped for a moment, but I didn’t want to give this particular Hook the pleasure. Instead I yawned openly.
“Perhaps it’s time for tiger’s nap?” he said lustfully. “I’m a touch weary myself. Or maybe I’m just jaded.” Then he laughed at his joke as if he’d been his own audience for too many years.
“Berry,” I said dully, and collapsed on the table amid the ruins of lunch.
BERRY’S medical chart revealed that she could be found in her bed at the hospital during her mother’s abduction. There was no record, however, of her mother’s absence from the house, and I awoke on my wicker love seat in a moist heap, dazed but curiously full. I ran to the bathroom and promptly threw up. A great deal of crust came up, mixed with black water.
Feeling somewhat relieved, I phoned Freeman at Skywalker. “Hi,” I said weakly. “I’m having a bad day.”
Freeman reported that work was going “bodaciously” on his sound design for animated nuts and bolts—All Screwed Up was the feature’s working title—and he planned to work through the night. “That’s good,” I said. “Really,” I added.
“Then why don’t I believe you?” he said.
“I’m in trouble,” I told him. “You know, the bad day I just referred to?”
I heard a massive sigh through the receiver. “Wends, I can’t deal with this now.”
“Oh,” I said brightly. “Please tell me the right time, so I can be there.”
“Snideness is not the proper response,” Freeman said.
“Then what is!” I hollered into the phone.
“I’m just trying to keep this family together. Not doing the greatest job, but trying. What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying too.”
“Well, try a little harder not to make up your mind about what’s happening.”
“What is happening, Man? Hey, that sounds cool, doesn’t it? Like, man, what’s happening!”
“Wendy,” Freeman said mildly. “Berry and I need you to be strong now.”
“Well, sorry to disappoint,” I said, the old nausea rising in my stomach. “Sorry that—“The words got lost in my throat.
“Stop this, Wendolyn. Time to get real.”
“Ha, that’s a good one, coming from you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do—get real. But it appears that’s not in the cards. It appears that I’m stuck in some portal between what’s real and what’s clearly insane. That neither world wants me. Whaddya know, I’m a reject in two dimensions!”
“Wends,” Freeman said again, this time so softly I might have imagined it. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m not trying to humor you, dear.”
“Wendy!” he said, more harshly now. “I just can’t stand it anymore. I can’t stand the anger, the ghosts, the craziness.”
“And so you won’t have to.”
I slammed the receiver on the kitchen table, then ripped out the cord from the wall. Flinging open the refrigerator door, I removed a half-gallon of springwater from the top shelf and took a long drink directly from the jug. With the jug in one hand and a Terminator mug in the other, I retreated to the bedroom. I was very thirsty, I recall.
After swallowing a handful of ibuprofen and five or eight Valium, I can’t remember exactly, I took to bed with my clothes on and the covers drawn over my head. It was clear I had a choice to make: whether to succumb to the fever dreams of Hook or the fever dreams of Berry. Why not bow to both, I told myself, and take a little vacation? My bags were packed with really bad ideas, and I was off and running. I was prepared to sleep for a very long time.
XIII
OCCUPYING a hospital room down the hall from Berry wasn’t as convenient as it sounds. There’s little privacy to be found on a psych ward, and God knows it’s tough to focus on healing with a family member in residence. But there was nowhere else to put me on such short notice.
It only took me twenty-four hours to lose my appetite for the two realities I’d come to know and love. A new, third way now presented itself, one in which I was neither mother nor wife, nor child of Mummy Dearest. I was a mean, flighty thing—a fairy, if you will. With no discretion whatsoever, I began to tell everyone who entered my room to “shut up,” and with a frequency that would have frightened me if I wasn’t already institutionalized. This strategy beat the pants off depression, I should add, for it requires energy to be cranky—it’s proactive. In time I became adept at silencing my visitors before they could manage to peep hello. The resulting silence was complicated: I ended up with whole days during which I was alone and pissed off. If Freeman deigned to show up, I could always be counted on for a few choice epithets—“Hey, cartoon-brains!” or “Hiya, sound hound!”—and to toss chunky Vogue magazines at the wall. This would easily buy more time with my newly emerging self.
While the target of my bitterness was “the whole fucking world, i.e. my mother, my daughter, my husband, my Peter,” its source remained a mystery to the doctors. They had their theories, of course, and liked to take the metaphorical road to diagnosis. To start, they chalked up any talk of Jason Hook to some “mild” form of child molestation I’d suffered at the hands of an unnamed adult. The Neverland, they said, represented a kind of idealized, controlled environment that provided a convenient escape from my trauma. This was a hoot because one never assumes what’s going to happen next on the island—it’s the epitome of spontaneity and improvisation! Alas, the experts’ theory about Peter cut closer to the bone: an instant replay of Daddy, they said, but pint-sized and flawless. If that were so, I said, then why would my idealized guy go AWOL? What ideal does abandonment serve?
At first Berry wasn’t certain what to make of my swan dive, whether to be furious or embarrassed. For some reason, though, my incarceration proved just the thing to inspire her reentry to society. It
turns out that while I was preoccupied with my descent, Berry began to emerge from her confusion: she watched Oprah and Ricki Lake with a daily, near-religious allegiance; she filled entire sketchbooks with monsters that bore smiley faces; and, after weeks of refusing to speak, she became the leading voice of her group therapy sessions. The other patients came to depend on her for her humane snap judgments: “You’re pure evil, Joyce, so get over it.” “Word up, Doug: it’s not gonna get better, so learn to love your face. We have.”
To speed up the therapeutic process for both of us, the doctors decided to introduce Berry into my regimen of pills and talk therapy. They felt it would be healing for mother and daughter to interact for one hour every Monday, and encouraged us to share our “colorful stories,” as though they were baseball trading cards. Little did they know that I had nothing to say to Berry. My days in bed had afforded me a single, if dreadful, epiphany: as a teenager who liked to “act out”—entire Greek tragedies, it seemed—Berry had punished me more than she knew. Her lack of interest in me, her withholding of love, had fairly destroyed me—I was certain of it. But I would not let her have it, refused to carve my rage into her like a perverse graffito. Words may have been my ultimate defense against my daughter, but she didn’t deserve them. I’d burn up my own psyche before I would touch hers. Besides, Berry had whacked away at her own mind for as long as she was conscious, meaning her whole life.
The knock on the door was akin to a bludgeon and it swung open before I had the poise to say “Get lost.” Berry entered my close hospital quarters, a microclimate of thick air sweetened by the vanilla-scented candles I favored and very likely heated by the steam from my new temperament. “Come in,” I said belatedly. Without asking she sat down on the bed, keeping her distance. So the doctors had tipped her off about my promising new viciousness.
With my face hidden behind a months-old Entertainment Weekly, I twisted tufts of my uncombed hair. Every so often I would peek out at my “difficult” daughter: sitting before me was a young woman who, in place of her usual stony self, exuded an air of tea and sympathy. Berry’s face especially had been drawn by a more compassionate artist. The once-hard eyes shone with a velvety, Bambilike softness; the full lips, normally downturned and pursed, were relaxed in a half-smile. Her outfit, though, betrayed no trace of transformation: ripped plaid tights clung to her legs while an oversized black cable-stitch sweater hung from her torso—leaving no clue as to her physique. My best guess was that underneath the shroud lived a delicious, unwanted shapeliness.
“Mu-Mu.” Berry spoke musically, without her trademark sarcasm.
I looked away from my daughter, possibly for the first time ever. I couldn’t bear to hear her bass note of concern, which had arrived a few minutes late in my regard. Besides, if she were really, truly caring, I’d have no right to my anger and we couldn’t have that. I’d waited too long to find a safe place wherein I could rail against the unfairness of practically everything. Now, if there were to be a sea change, a new spirit of fairness, where would that put me? I’d be forced to be my good-hearted self—which would totally suck, as Berry might say. No, this was my lone chance to be vile and no one would take it away from me.
“Ber,” I said weakly. “How’s it hanging?”
“It’s hung,” she said amiably. “I mean, yeah, it’s going all right. It’s gonna be all right. It better.” So the medicine was doing its work. She studied me with her Bambi eyes and the sensation was unbearable.
“So, it’s going well,” I said flatly. “How very, very good for you.” I reviewed the ceiling as intently as Great-Nana once had done in my presence.
“Mu-Mu.” Berry reached out to touch me, the flesh of her fingers hidden behind at least a dozen rings. I saw skulls and gladiator spikes.
Spurning her gesture, I instead grabbed her right hand and dug my nails into its fleshy pad. “So everybody’s getting better. How perfectly wonderful.”
Berry squeezed back, and my hand lost feeling. “Mother, you can’t fool me. You’re not the crazy one.” She winked to underscore her words, which was genuinely funny because she’d always rejected my own burlesque winking.
I smiled in spite of everything, and despite the fact that I couldn’t believe I was doing so, said, “Yes, darling. You have a right to your madness. I wouldn’t want to take anything so precious away from you.”
Berry burst out in hot, salty tears. “Mu-Mu, how could you be so—”
“Un-feeling? Un-affected? God, am I affected,” I said. “I am so affected that I’ve traveled the whole spectrum—from bighearted to heartless. It’s the new, impassive me. You like?”
Berry jabbed me in the forearm, then ran out of the room. “That’s my girl!” I said, cheering her on. But she was gone and I was left with my hideousness, something only the nurse’s meds could appreciate.
My days on the psych ward crept by, burdened with vintage resentments and clouded by still-smoking wounds. And here I’d envied Berry for “getting away from it all.” My envy, I’m loath to admit, turned out to be just one more grievance in a sorry litany. I received my daughter on Monday afternoons with the faintest aura of interest, quietly observing the fact that she was getting better while I was getting worse. Berry’s interest in me was only temporary, I knew. And I could not allow anyone’s concern for me to take root.
On our fourth Monday meeting, we took a stroll of the hospital grounds, stopping in a narrow, shrub-choked alley optimistically called the Sculpture Garden. In fact there was only one sculpture: a pseudo–Henry Moore statue of unknown origin and sex. Without breasts or cock it was impossible to know what to make of the thing.
Berry relaxed up against the statue, snuggling her face in its cold, abstract groin. “Mu-Mu,” she crowed, “get a load of me! I’m being born all over again.”
“Very cool,” I said mechanically, looking away.
“Muth-er,” Berry protested. “It’s no good if you don’t watch.”
“You mean it won’t kill me as completely if I don’t watch.”
“Whatever.” She shrugged.
“What-evah,” I mimicked with a curled lip. “You mean,” I soldiered on, “that your actions won’t count if I don’t get all freaked-out like a real mother.” I sat down at the statue’s feet and picked at its thick marble toes. Berry slid down from the corpulent thighs to sit opposite me.
“Well, you never get all freaked-out, you never go ballistic,” she said. “You’re just so lenient and so liberal, it makes me wanna puke! It makes me actually puke.”
“It does?” I said, alarmed, recalling my own mysterious bouts with nausea. “That’s because you want attention,” I said, hardening. “You want attention?” I repeated, a little more amped.
“Yep,” Berry conceded.
“Okay. Very well. Because you’ve got my attention now!” I wrung the bulky material at her waist but found no flesh there. “Does it feel good? Is it everything you always hoped it would be?”
Berry shrunk back, cowering between the statue’s legs. At that moment I hated myself and yet I forged ahead. “Does my attention confirm everything you’ve always believed—that you’re really, really bad? I don’t know ‘cause I’ve lost track of your intentions, Berry. I wonder, does my recognition hurt like hell or does it feel like God is watching over you, after all? Or does it just prove how separate you are—that something that began life inside me has gotten along without me for a long, long time. Perhaps you are so thoroughly free of me, you can remind me of this any goddamn time you want to?”
I flung my body in her direction, the skirt of my fifties shirtwaist dress ballooning in the air. When I tried to speak again, I gagged on my thoughts, my rush of ideas. Like Berry had, I sought refuge in the figure’s groin and clung to its abstractions.
Berry now stood over me, her cheeks glistening with tears and drool. She pulled the hair back from my face like a curtain. “Mu-Mu, you’re a really bad actress, did you know that?”
“Excrementally bad,
” I agreed.
“And,” Berry continued without taking in air, “I know it’s a family tradition to go all fetal at the first sign of trouble, but really. You take the cake. You take the whole freaking bakery!” She moved in closer. “And here’s a news bulletin for you: I’m not free, not like you said. Because I happen to, sort of, like you. And you can’t be free if you feel that. But why—when I need you the most—why do you go and put yourself in a nuthouse with me? Is that what you call attention? Because there’s a word for mothers who put themselves in nuthouses. I believe they call it negligence.” Berry grabbed the statue’s thumb and set her mouth around it; her dark eyes drilled me like lasers.
I slapped my forehead with my palm. “God, honey. I’m, you know, trying. I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you.”
“Inconvenienced? That sounds like you had to go to the bank or something.”
“What, then? What is it you want from me? A damage report? I’ve been here for you for like a thousand years. So I screwed up just once. Just one small miserable time.” My hands covered my face so she couldn’t get to it.
“Yeah, you’ve been here. You and Daddy were always somewhere in the house. But I swear you cared more about your stories than . . . me. My whole life, I’ve had to compete with Daddy’s noise and your stupid, poopy forest animals. Pink bears and paisley pigs.”
“My bears are not pink. And, what you said? It’s not fair.”
“I don’t care about fair.” She held hands with the statue. “I just don’t want to be a part of the Darling show. I tried to be a part of it, and it’s not a good look for me. The cute native boys? The silly jokes? The sewing? If you haven’t noticed, Mother, I’m into sex. Into hard, rough sex.”
I dropped my hands from my face and looked straight at her. “I can’t do this anymore, this mother-daughter dialogue.”
