Exit Laughing

by Victoria Zackheim

  Janice rolled closer, just outside the TV room, and I turned to her because the sound was erasing every zoink! and zowie!, every boink! and doing! I knew she was lost in the task, dreaming of doing anything but running over Cheerios with our vacuum cleaner, and I squeezed my eyes shut to avoid the thought of it. And when I opened them the coyote, who’d strapped himself to a lit missile, was soaring toward the Road Runner with a huge and confident grin. This animal had amazing optimism for someone who failed as often as he did. The vacuum shut off for a second, and the silence was joyous.

  BOING! ZOINK! ZOWIE! Yes! But then my younger sister and brother came barreling into the room, chasing each other and toppling near my plate of pizza, blocking the television with their lesser sibling selves. “Move!” I barked, but they didn’t listen. My brother, Alex, a toddler, was smothering my little sister, Rachel, and she screamed in his ear and slapped his butt, and I starting watching them like I watched the television, adding to their mayhem by lightly jabbing any bit of flesh that pointed my way. Rachel’s foot hit my pizza, and it sprayed sauce on the laces of her white sneaker. “Hey!”

  “Whoops.”

  “Move!” I said again, and they did, to the couch where they settled, quieted, watching the cartoon. The pizza was okay, thank God. Rachel, sucking her thumb, leaned on a huge floor pillow with a barn setting painted on it. The sheep looked like polar bears, and for some reason a zebra was in the yard, eating where the cows should have been. Alex sneezed and had a bubble of snot expanding from his nose. It filled and rounded while he ignored it and laughed at the way the Road Runner pulled to a halt just before a cliff, leaving the coyote to overrun the edge, dropping once again. Alex giggled and looked at me, swiping at his nose with his elbow.

  In the quiet, I could hear the wind outside making a swirling, high-pitched whistle, and a tapping began on the window above the TV, as if someone out there were trying to get our attention. I looked up and saw the rhododendrons in our front yard bumping the glass. A gray sky blanketed what had been blue, so sudden a change, and now it might rain, even pour. When I stood to see the action, I noticed my father’s car in the driveway. Really? During the Road Runner?

  It was the first time in my life that I’d ever seen the man home before six on a weekday, and my immediate thought was a parent-teacher conference. Yikes. I could hear my teacher sighing before she spoke, “He daydreams, stares out at the trees, never seems engaged, and is constantly looking at the time, packing his things a half hour before the bell.”

  Please. No.

  Did my father exist at 3:45 PM on a school day? was a question that hadn’t been answered until now, so I stared at his Lincoln Continental, which I knew was making those panging noises under its wide, overheated hood. I asked my siblings if they knew why he was home and waited to hear his booming voice or the sound of his two thick briefcases as they pounded onto the floor in the front hall. Alex got up to see the car, and I sat on the couch next to my sister, ignoring the zoinks! and zowies! and the taps of the rhododendrons, because I needed to know where my father was. I knew it couldn’t be good, the Lincoln in the driveway during cartoons, and then I thought it was a surprise, and then I thought he was away on a trip and had taken a cab, and then I heard the strangest thing: a yelp or a high scream, but not a woman’s scream. A fierce and piercing shriek, a man’s cry for life, and the eyes of my brother and sister leapt to me for answers, but my eyes searched theirs for the same.

  Janice said something in a mumble, and the heavy thumping of feet raced down the back staircase like thundering guns, straight for the TV room, and silence would have found us but for the beep-beep of the Road Runner as my father’s terrified face came into view. And he just glared at me, slack-jawed and pale, as I waited for the walls to crumble, the fire to spread.

  “Take your brother and sister in the backyard,” he said. “And don’t come back until I tell you to.”

  It was bad. Whatever it was. And my skin tingled as the possibilities swirled in my brain. I knew this much: my tone with my brother and sister would need to reflect calm. I kept my voice high and friendly, as if we’d all just met. “Should we play a game? Who wants to go on the swings?”

  As a leader, I was new, a rookie, wobbly-kneed but standing, and they both looked at me like a stranger.

  “Good. Let’s play on the swings,” I repeated, and thought only of my father, picturing him entangled with a predator, a murderer, and where was Janice, poor Janice? Outside, I pointed at the jungle gym and asked Alex what he had done in school that day, and the absurdity of the question, coming from me, seemed to be the clincher for him. He began to cry, the tears building on themselves, his mouth wide now, the end of times. His sorrow thwarted our route to the swings, and I told them both that Dad would call us when it was time to come back and that there was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. My sister looked back at the house and I guided them, my hands on their shoulders, farther into the yard.

  “Look,” I said, finding a dog-chewed Wiffle ball near the swings. Neither of them cared. The sky was silver and streaked with blackened clouds that were trading positions with bizarre speed. A storm. I tossed the ball to Rachel, and it landed at her feet. “Come on, throw it back.”

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Why was Dad scared?”

  “I … didn’t think that. There’s nothing wrong. Throw it. Throw me the ball. Give me a pop up.”

  She didn’t. She leaned to see the house.

  “I want to go back,” Alex said.

  “What happened to Dad?” Rachel said and began to weep as well.

  I walked to the ball and tossed it to Alex. It bumped his chest and fell to the grass. In my brother and sister’s faces I saw my own thoughts. Doom. I told them to stop crying and to just toss me the stupid ball, but I knew something evil was unraveling back there, hovering over our things, our suburban safety. The gnawing of it all was in my throat and my kneecaps, and I, too, was beginning to freak. Was my dad hurt? Would we ever be the same? Frozen pizza, teacher conferences, and vacuums creating the buzzes of lazy weekday afternoons. Had the Road Runner ended? Was the TV engulfed in flames? Where was Janice standing, and would the zebra pillow be charred by the vicious bite of whatever scared my father into that hideous scream?

  And then I remembered. Late the night before, my mother’s mother had arrived from Australia and was staying in the guest room on the second floor. I’d only met her once when I was three, my siblings never, because she was an expat, a traveler, a woman we heard about at bedtime. She’d come home to the States because her second husband, Eric, had died suddenly while mowing his Australian lawn in his Australian town. In Australia. She was sick, she was dead, she was naked.

  Had my father called my mother at work? The siren of the ambulance was distant, like yet another suburban moan, and the years I had on my siblings alerted me first that it was headed toward us, our home. Their tears had subsided, and Alex was actually eyeing the swings as the siren got louder, more crisp. My sister stepped closer to the house, knowing that the ambulance was headed for us. She turned to me, and I could see her bottom teeth, which was odd since I didn’t recognize them, so small, so hidden by her normal smile. She moved farther across the lawn, back to the house, and I loudly said, “Leap frog,” to which Alex hit the dirt in gleeful anticipation of being hopped. I put my palms flat on his back and jumped over him, feigning a giggle, so much fun.

  “Your turn! Jump over me now, buddy.”

  Rachel said, “Look,” and there was no more hiding the loud red lights and screaming siren in our driveway, screeching to a stop behind the Lincoln. Paramedics hustled up our porch steps, and we all saw the front door swing wide.

  The house was quiet as both my siblings squeaked, too scared to cry, and I heard familiar sounds over our neighbor’s fence, a bark, a slammed screen door, as if no one had told the rest of the world that we were finished, ruined, slotted to suffer like families on the news.

  The three of us stood in
the driveway and stared at our tightly wrapped grandmother on the stretcher with orange straps. Defeated and pale, her white hair was matted and frayed, her eyelids closed. My father leaned down to her and said something in her ear before the men lifted her inside the ambulance. I don’t think she heard what he said.

  She’d scribbled love letters as the pills took effect, and I saw them that evening as my mom and dad pieced them together, searching for information that would never come from her lips. Her dire words drooped off the lines of her powder-blue stationery and came to a scribbled ending at the bottom of the page. I rested my cheek against my mother’s shoulder as she taped the torn edges of the note.

  I didn’t enter the room where it happened for months after my grandmother died. Like a roped-off crime scene, our guest room held a haunting beam that I could sometimes see beneath the crack in my bedroom door, just down the hall.

  Ellio’s pizza and the zoinks! and zowies! of a fast bird and a coyote strapped to a torpedo would forever remind me of my grandma’s final minutes. I knew now about a sadness so vicious and unrelenting that a woman who loved us took her own life, as her daughter’s children frolicked like puppies beneath her.

  The cartoon was a facade, as were the vacuum, swing set, and shifting sky. A few weeks later I found myself sitting in front of the TV, blowing on my pizza as my siblings chased each other, falling into a tangle of little arms and sneakers. Janice was vacuuming, and the Road Runner had tied an anvil to a grand piano and strapped a rocket to it all, preparing to light the fuse.

  “Beep-beep,” he said, and Janice unplugged the vacuum.

  I stood from the couch, and got on my toes to see if my dad’s car was in the driveway. It wasn’t. In fact there was no sound at all, except the very gentle tapping of the rhododendrons bumping against the glass.

  MEASURING GRIEF

  — Benita Garvin —

  In 1980, I wrote my second stage play. My first was under submission to the Eugene O’Neill Festival, and I was not yet aware that it would become a finalist. My new play was about the death grip of a mother-daughter relationship. In my story, the daughter couldn’t become her own person until she broke away from her controlling and competitive mother. The daughter resentfully works in the mother’s chic clothing boutique, and their fragile relationship unravels when the daughter moves away and starts a new life. Years later, on the eve of winning an award for her first novel, she receives a call that her mother, unable to cope with her daughter’s independence, has attempted suicide and has called her to her bedside.

  In 2002, I was nominated for an Edgar Award for a film I wrote and produced. Days before, when I was to fly from Los Angeles, where I lived, to New York City to attend the black-tie event, I was awakened at the crack of dawn by a telephone call from a nurse in Florida with the news that my mother and my father had attempted suicide. In fact, they had made three attempts, all in the space of several hours, and failed, which is why they were in the hospital, rather than the morgue.

  My mother was the de facto ringleader in the folie à deux that was my parents’ marriage. When my eldest niece was ten years old, she asked the question that haunted me: what would happen to the remaining grandparent when the other one died? She felt certain one couldn’t exist without the other. I was amazed that a child of ten could articulate my deepest fear and that someone so young, a child who saw my parents as infrequently as she did—perhaps twice a year—could sense the depth of their symbiosis.

  My mother was a drama queen. Her death, or the threat of it, was perennially on the table. I remember her talking about putting her head in the oven or chiding me for digging her an early grave when I was a kid. As we both got older, the frequency of intimidations and threats of suicide increased, with my father joining her in the refrain.

  My father was fun loving and easy going when I was growing up, but with age he became increasingly depressed and angry. The differences in my parents’ personalities grew less distinguishable, until they seemed to merge into one. Like my mother, my father felt wronged and unappreciated. Together they struck back at the people and institutions they felt failed them by writing poison-pen letters, filing lawsuits, and picketing businesses.

  The nurse on the phone informed me that the first of their three attempts occurred when they swallowed all the prescription medications in their house. At age eighty-seven and eighty-four respectively, my father and mother were in relatively good health. They had their share of ailments, and my father had come through a recent bout of colon cancer. Yet he hadn’t had to endure chemotherapy or radiation and was given a 100 percent clean bill of health. Their maladies—high blood pressure, cholesterol, glaucoma, and so on—were common for people of their age. And although the required medications were expensive, they weren’t lethal.

  When the meds failed to achieve the desired effect, my parents moved into the closed garage, where they got into the car, turned on the ignition, and waited. Nothing happened. Finally, they returned to the house and, after a brief discussion, decided to slit their wrists. My mother couldn’t bring herself to do it and pleaded with my father to do it for her. He refused. They found the sharpest kitchen knife, which most likely had been purchased at the ninety-nine-cent store years earlier and could barely cut paper, and attempted to slit their wrists. My mother cut vertically rather than horizontally, and neither of them cut deeply enough to sever a vein. All they succeeded in doing was making a bloody mess on the kitchen floor. They bled, waited, and bled some more, but they didn’t die. That’s when my father called 911.

  As I spoke to the nurse, I inquired with apprehension about their conditions, expecting the nurse to say they were in comas or straitjackets. Instead, I was put through to my father, who sounded exactly as he might have sounded had I called in the middle of dinner. The timbre of his voice lent credibility to his claim that the entire incident was a “mistake.” As we spoke, we were interrupted by my mother’s voice on the extension.

  With the three of us on the phone, they began to argue, each disputing the facts surrounding their misguided suicide attempts. Here they were, literally in lockdown and under twenty-four-hour surveillance for having committed what the state of Florida deemed a crime, and they were fighting over whether it was his idea or hers. Had it been up to either of them, they would’ve simply checked out of what they seemed to think was an overpriced hotel with bad interior design and crappy food. And just try and get a night’s sleep! Fortunately, they couldn’t simply get up and walk: they were confined to the psychiatric wing.

  It was surreal.

  My mother’s childhood, like my father’s and others of their generation, was defined by the Great Depression. She grew up in brutal poverty wearing paper shoes to her school graduation. She was an only child in a loveless marriage. A photograph of her at age eight hanging on a wall in our home depicts a lonely little girl whose sad eyes had yet to dance with joy or laughter. Although it’s sometimes hard to reconcile the bitter, angry person he was at the end of his life with the beloved funny man who would entertain the kids on our block with songs and stories when I was a child, my father’s sense of humor was what first attracted her to him. Their fifty-plus-year marriage was an amalgam of love, loyalty, resentment, and utter devotion.

  When people ask me why my parents attempted suicide, I usually say that it was depression. The truth is, it was a temper tantrum gone awry. Their bags were packed. They were on their way from Florida to Detroit, our hometown, with the intention of moving back for the third time. It was the middle of the night, and they were facing a ninety-minute drive to the Tampa airport and another hour waiting to pass through security.

  This would’ve been the sixteenth or seventeenth move for my parents since retiring. They had spent two decades moving back and forth between Detroit, Florida, and Los Angeles. And once they settled in those cities, they proceeded to move within them. My mother was an interior designer, so it was assumed that she did it for business. To an outside observer, it might loo
k like they were searching for the meaning of life, when in fact they were actually running from it.

  On this particular night, facing the prospect of uprooting themselves yet again, my father was loading the suitcases into the car when my mother said she was too tired to face what was ahead. Rather than go back to bed, they opted for the Big Sleep. Out came the pills, and the madness began. It was that impetuosity, that spontaneous reckless behavior, and actions predicated on a whim that were at the root of the countless bad decisions my parents made over their lifetime, decisions that led them to run frantically around their house at four in the morning, a house they had just built and moved into, on their way to finding a new house in another part of the country.

  A dangerous blend of fatigue, age, fear, a shrinking bank account, and profound neuroses caused them to suddenly change course and decide to end it all. What better way to punish the people they deemed responsible for their circumstances? They had just lost another lawsuit, one in which they invested what little remained in their savings; they were angry at the judge and the neighbors they had sued; they were angry at my brother for not agreeing to cosign on a new mortgage for them in Detroit; and they were angry at me because they were always angry at me.

  They wanted to get our attention. And no amount of love from their children, grandchildren, or many friends satiated that need. My parents were determined to self-destruct.

  My father used to tease my mother and say she was Japanese, because of her preoccupation with appearances and saving face. “What will [fill in the blank with a name] think?” was a mantra I heard as frequently as “Look before crossing the street.” Growing up in the years before air-conditioning meant opening a window. My mother would scurry around the kitchen during dinner, a stifling heat outside, and close the windows to prevent our neighbors from hearing what might be construed as a small conflict or bad manners.