Bebe Moore Campbell (18 page)

14

THE GRADUATION CARDS HAD BEGUN ARRIVING IN LATE May. High school. College. The children of my friends were growing up, moving on. Their proud parents trumpeted the news.

I crumpled the announcement cards in my hands. Piercing paper points stabbed my palms. Sharp edges cut my fingers. Another reason to cry. Everybody’s damn kid was graduating. I mailed check after check. At the bottom of my cards I wrote “Congratulations,” followed by gay exclamation points.

God, please, don’t let me be like this. Please take this envy from me.

Meanwhile, Trina was relatively quiet. Behind her bedroom door she mumbled and shuffled back and forth. She played her CDs and the television, but the sounds emanating from her quarters were subdued. My shoulders shouldn’t have come down, but they did. I shouldn’t have mistaken a period of calm for healing. But I couldn’t help thinking:
Maybe today is the day I’ll get her back.

My birthday wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I received roses from Clyde and a bottle of perfume from Orlando, a bracelet from Adriana and cards from Frances, Mattie, and Gloria. Trina stayed in bed all day long, so at least the house was peaceful. At eight o’clock that night, I was putting away my dinner dishes when the doorbell rang. Moments later, PJ was standing in front of me, holding a bouquet of flowers.

“Happy birthday,” he said after I let him in. He handed me the flowers.

“Thank you, PJ. How did you get here?”

“I walked.”

“Does anyone know where you are?”

He shook his head.

“You hungry?”

He sat down on one of the high chairs at the kitchen counter. I warmed up leftovers: chicken, rice, greens. PJ dug in as though he hadn’t eaten in a week. Watching him, I remembered all the times I’d cooked for him and his brother, all the times they’d gone to sleep in my guest room. Orlando’s sons and my daughter had laughed together over bowls of ice cream, over Monopoly boards, and while watching videos. Orlando and I used to marvel at how well they got along. Even when we weren’t together, the kids always managed to maintain their relationship. Just before Trina had gotten ill, she’d gone to the movies with the boys.

“Is Trina crazy?”

I was bent over the dishwasher, and that’s the position I froze in. “Who told you that?”

PJ looked bewildered. He hadn’t expected questions. “I heard.”

“Oh, really? From whom?” I straightened up slowly and walked over to PJ.

He stared back at me, unsure of what to say.

“Was it your dad?”

He shook his head. “Jabari said he heard somebody say that.”

I didn’t know I’d been holding my breath until I heard myself exhaling. “Trina’s going through something, PJ,” I said, hesitating, trying to pick the best words. “Her mind is kind of overloaded, and she’s not thinking clearly.”

“Is she going to get better?”

I hesitated again, this time to wait out the tears that were stinging my eyelids. “I think so.”

PJ stared at me hard, perhaps sensing my unsureness, my helplessness.

“So, PJ, what’s this I hear about a tattoo?”

“Aw,” he said. His face registered a mixture of bravado and embarrassment.

“So let’s see it.”

He lifted his shirt and turned around. Written with a flourish across the small of his back were the words FUCK YOU, just as Orlando had described.

“PJ, you want to tell me why you put that on your back?”

His reasons weren’t coherent. Something about everybody did it. He mentioned several rappers. He sounded angry when he was talking. And then he sounded sad.

“My dad was mad about it at first. But then, it was like, whatever. He’s got an audition, so whatever. He’s got to rehearse, so whatever. Anyway,” he said, after a moment of silence passed between us, “I might have it taken off when I get older and start working a regular job and stuff.”

“I can’t wait for that day.”

PJ looked at me, and a grin spread across his face. I hugged him, and he hugged me back.

“Have you had that conversation yet?” I asked.

He shook his head, then looked at me. “You don’t know how hard it is just to say it to myself. You’re the only person I’ve told. My brother doesn’t even know. People are going to start treating me differently. Everybody’s not like you. Can we not talk about this?”

I nodded.

“Is Trina home?” he asked.

I sighed and let him go. “She’s sleeping right now.” Before he could ask me any more questions, I said, “Let me take you home.”

“I HAVE SEEN THE TATTOO,” I TOLD ORLANDO LATER THAT night, when we spoke on the telephone.

“PJ’s tattoo?”

“The very same. He came over tonight. He walked.”

“Really. He misses you.”

“Yeah. I miss him and Jabari too. So I fed your hungry boy and then I asked to see his tattoo. He said he might have it taken off when he’s older. So I took that as a sign that he regrets the whole episode. If I were you, I’d casually approach him about removing it in a couple of months. Maybe just the two of you could go do something together that would get him in a talking mood.”

“All right. Thanks. Oh, the rehearsals are going really well. They’ve invited a lot of television and movie people for opening night, which will work out great since it’s so close to pilot season. Maybe I can go right from the play into a series. That’s the point of doing these hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar-a-week gigs. Exposure, baby. I got you sitting right up front on opening night.”

“Have you heard back about your sitcom audition?” I knew as soon as I said the words, as soon as I heard him inhale, that he hadn’t made the cut.

“I couldn’t be as dumb as they wanted,” Orlando said. Then he switched topics, going on and on about the play. Several times I tried to break in, to tell him about PJ and how he wanted to know about Trina, but he was wound up, ready for his close-up, so I just let him talk. Maybe that’s how it had always been with Orlando and me. There were times when I just let him talk, but I wasn’t really listening and he didn’t really care.

I felt lonely after I hung up the phone, a feeling I couldn’t shake off in the days that followed. In the past I’d prayed for as much silence and avoidance as Trina now began doling out. She didn’t scream; she didn’t curse. Only now I needed for her to get out of control, to break my windows, yell and scream and threaten me: to meet the criteria. But she was quiet, talking on the telephone, leaving water running, not flushing toilets, but doing nothing that would have gotten her put on a seventy-two-hour hold. So I waited. Maybe she was waiting too.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t smelled weed in days. Whoever had been supplying her had cut her off, or maybe she was worn out from climbing up the drug staircase, hopping from cigarettes to liquor to weed and who knew what else. Each step had promised tranquillity, a restoration of balance. Each step had lied. The staircase was circular. The drugs calmed her initially, then set her off.

In her current state, Trina was relatively tranquil because she wasn’t stressed out. Her room, equipped with a television, CD player, and telephone, her current drug of choice, was devoid of triggers. Her mealy-mouth mama, passively accepting her highs, her lows, making no demands, walking on eggshells with skill and interminable patience, wasn’t upping the ante.

If she was ever to be my pearl again, I had to be her grain of sand.

There was risk involved, of course. She could become manic and still not meet the criteria. I could create a monster I’d be forced to endure.

Since she’d been off her medication, Trina never cleaned up the kitchen. From the garage door one evening after work I observed the usual chaos: dirty dishes swimming in oil-slick water, food smeared on the counter, cabinet doors wide open. I took a deep breath. My fury was effortless, a vein just waiting to be tapped. I screamed my displeasure from the bottom of the back stairs all the way to the top, where I pushed open the door to Trina’s room and yelled some more.

She was in the bed watching cartoons, giggling like a toddler. Her first glance was filled with curiosity, as though Mom was just another form of entertainment. She actually chuckled. I stormed across the floor to her bed and yanked the covers off. She jumped up.

“Leave me alone, you bitch!”

“This is my house, and I won’t let you turn it into a garbage can. Go downstairs and clean up that kitchen right now.”

“Fuck you!”

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that.”

I moved in closer, pressing my chest against hers. She pushed back with her hands. I let them stay on me for seconds, and then I fled downstairs. I called SMART.

Today is the day I get her back.

The team, when it arrived, was made up of people I hadn’t met before, a white psychiatric social worker and a Latino assistant. Minutes later two police officers drove up.

“What’s going on?” the psychiatric worker asked me, when she came inside. Her name was Hilda Griffin, and she looked permanently weary.

“My daughter has bipolar disorder, and she’s not taking her meds. She assaulted me.”

“What’s your name? What’s your daughter’s name?”

She wrote them down in a book she was carrying.

“How old is Trina?”

“She’s eighteen. She assaulted me.”

“What exactly did she do?”

“She pushed me.”

“When?”

“Right before I called you guys.”

Ms. Griffin tilted her head, eyed me. “Were you fighting?”

“I asked her to clean up the kitchen.”

“Where is she now?”

“Upstairs in her room.”

Ms. Griffin waited until the two police officers were in the house before she went to look for Trina. My entourage trailed behind me.

Trina was back under the covers, her entire body hidden from view.

Ms. Griffin directed her questions to the lump in the bed. Her voice took on a soothing quality that had been lacking when she interrogated me. Maybe she thought I didn’t need soothing.

“Trina, I’d like to see your face, dear. Can you come out from under the covers?”

I held my breath, looking from one authority figure to the other.

“Trina, dear, let’s talk. I’d like to help you.”

Glancing at her partner, she shrugged her shoulders.

What kind of shrug was that? Was that an “our work here is done” shrug?

“You fellows can leave,” Ms. Griffin said to the police.

Shit.

I walked them back down the stairs and out the door and returned to Trina’s room.

The social worker and her partner were standing outside the door, which was closed. “I can see there is a problem,” she said.

“She hit me,” I said. “A danger to others. That’s the criterion.”

Ms. Griffin placed her card in my palm. “I thought you said she pushed you.”

“I—”

“I can’t justify taking her in. Not today. Keep in touch.”

They went away quickly. And then it was Trina and me: Trina, an irritated wasp; me, the hand that had swatted her.

“Piece of shit.”

She came out from under the covers feeling emboldened, empowered. The authorities hadn’t taken her away. She was invincible.

Trina screamed until she was hoarse, until I slammed my bedroom door in her face. Any other time, the fight would have exhausted and demoralized me. But not now. Means to an end. Keep screaming, I thought. Only a matter of time and then everything will go my way. Just like potty training.

WITHIN A WEEK I HAD BECOME TELEPHONE FRIENDS WITH Hilda Griffin. I called her every other day to check in, to update, to prove to her that I wouldn’t go away. She came on duty after three, and when she was in the field I contacted her by cell phone. After the second call, I felt I had an ally. By the third call, she recognized my voice. She told me about her children, the son who started wetting the bed after her divorce. When she didn’t hear from me after three days, because I was busy, she called me.

Trina’s rage blew out in twenty-four hours, just another thing she couldn’t hold on to. Her general mood was low-grade edginess, a fever that rose and fell. At night I could hear her calling people on the telephone, roaming the hallway, at times singing. She never slept. During the day, she sat at the breakfast room table and wrote.

“It’s a novel,” she snarled when I asked her about it. Around her feet were wads of paper, literary rejects.

She wouldn’t allow me to read her work-in-progress, but I fished several of the balled-up sheets out of the trash can and stole a look. Trina had always been a good writer, but my new reality cautioned me to expect gibberish. To my surprise, the thoughts she’d set down on paper were clear. Actually, her writing made more sense than she did. Everything’s not gone, I thought. It’s not as though her mind burned up in a fire.

She can begin again. She’ll be a famous author!

The next few days settled into a pattern that, if not predictable, was somewhat comforting to me. When I left in the morning, Trina would be writing at the table, her head bent down over her tablet, oblivious to everything around her. When I returned home, she’d still be there. Almost immediately, she’d retreat to her room, where she would play music, watch television, and talk on the telephone until morning.

At least once a day, Clyde called from Seattle—where his show was being temporarily broadcast live from some conservative round table conference—wanting to know Trina’s every move. He was like the old me, anxious to interpret every sign as progress. On the third day, he said that Trina’s relative silence was an indication that she was calming down. I informed him that depression was the flip side of mania.

“You’re so negative!” he shouted.

“This isn’t going to go away, Clyde.”

“Maybe you don’t want it to go away. Maybe you don’t want her to be well, so you won’t be alone.”

“I’m not alone, you asshole. You’re the one who’s about to be alone.”

So much for our truce.

I called Ms. Griffin twice that week to report that my daughter seemed unable to stop writing, that she looked disheveled and didn’t bathe. I exaggerated as much as seemed plausible and tried not to think about how betrayed Trina would have felt if she’d heard me. Ma Missy had always told me not to put my business in the street. But that was an old rule, from my old life, about as useful to me as a training bra. The worse off I made Trina seem, the sooner she’d get help. So I didn’t tell Ms. Griffin that the house seemed peaceful with Trina’s overzealous productivity.