Haywire (20 page)

Bridget, far more than Bill or I, took an interest in the gruesome details of our maladies. Around this time, when she was six, her ambition shifted from becoming a housewife with ten children to becoming a doctor; not a bad idea, we all agreed, since the family could certainly use a good one in permanent residence, and besides she had a knack not only for precisely remembering the intricate names of hundreds of medicines prescribed for one ailment or another but also for matching them up to the correct symptoms—almost before they appeared—of the correct person. In addition, her poetry revealed a newspaper reporter’s relish for disaster:

Bridget and I shared a room, and more than once, awakened by one of my nocturnal coughing attacks, she would turn on the light, hop briskly onto my bed, and, with clinical composure, put her ear on my chest to assess the condition of my bronchia. If she diagnosed my condition as serious enough—that is, if I managed to convince her that each rasping breath was my last—she would vanish, phantomlike, into the cavernous darkness of the hall to rouse Emily. The sight of Emily was such a comfort that I would burst into tears of gratitude and self-pity, thereby worsening my condition. “Em,” Bridget would whisper matter-of-factly, “her wheeze is getting worser and worser, and something tells me she’s probably going to wheeze to death this time. Just put your head on her chest and listen. I think you’d better call Mother and Father and Dr. McKenzie right this minute. What she needs is a shot of Adrenalin.”

While waiting for Dr. McKenzie to arrive, Emily would prop me up with pillows, murmuring, “Shush, shush, there’s nothing to be afraid of; what a brave girl,” Bridget would pitter-patter around the bed with a bottle of Tedral, Mother would rush in tying her bathrobe and exclaiming, “What is this nonsense? Of course you’re not going to die, darling, I promise you,” and if Father was around, he would sit at the foot of my bed and reassuringly intone his favorite passage from Bemelman’s
Madeline:
“In the middle of one night, Miss Clavel turned on the light and said, ‘Something is not right!’ And, afraid of a disaster, Miss Clavel ran fast and faster, and she said, ‘Please, children, do—tell me what is troubling you?’ And all the little girls cried, ‘Boohoo, we want to have our appendix out, too!’ ‘Good night, little girls, thank the Lord you are well! And now go to sleep!’ said Miss Clavel. And she turned out the
light—and closed the door—and that’s all there is—there isn’t any more.”

Mother refused to be fazed by any of these crises. Once she had determined a course of action, she hacked her way through any opposition like a well-tempered steel blade; she had made up her mind about living on the farm, and that was that. She had made up her mind about our allergies, too: they were troublesome but temporary. We would outgrow them. Nature would take care of itself. All the cells in our bodies were being sloughed off like dead skin every seven years, replacing themselves with nice fresh ones (“Oh, no! Another seven years of
this?
”), and until then, the more exposed we were to whatever it was that triggered the allergies, the more resistance our immunological systems would build up. However impatient this theory made us, we clung to it like drowning rats, and it was, in any case, impossible to disbelieve anything Mother told us, because she was so convincing. She didn’t seem to talk, like other people, but to communicate information physically, as if she were leaning into whatever she was saying, not only with her voice—which even in a whisper crackled with electricity—but her entire body. “Absolutely! Positively!” The words hummed with the intensity of powerful incantations.

As totally as she projected the absolute essence of her own feelings, she absorbed totally—was penetrated by—the feelings of whoever was around her. It was a rare ability, but she never analyzed it; for her it was as simple and necessary, as natural, as breathing in and out. (“Come on, Brie, it’s so
easy
—just take a deep breath in,” she would say, patiently teaching Bridget, who was afraid of the water, how to swim. “Then blow it out. See the bubbles? In and out, that’s right; do it in rhythm, in and out”) As far as we, her children, were concerned, whatever we felt she felt it more. When we were sick and felt terrible, she felt worse. In order to reverse that process step by step before it got out of hand, she decided—when Mother made a decision, she would, mentally, plant her feet wide apart and clench her fists—first, above all else, not to transmit to us her feelings of alarm; second, to underplay the seriousness of the situation by discussing it with us only in matter-of-fact terms and then as little as possible (even though she herself would have read voluminously on the subject and consulted every conceivable medical authority); and indeed, third, to overplay
the humorous aspects, which were, of course, always the grimmest.

It was a wonderful performance, to which Mother applied all her favorite theatrical principles, and in a sense, Mother acted out much of what she believed, but so effortlessly, with such skill and conviction—and charm—that by the time she finished, what started out as a performance had changed into something infinitely more real than most reality. Much of the time, nobody, least of all she, could tell the difference. To us, when we were very young, life seemed like an exciting game, invented, explained, and directed by Mother. She was basically mischievous and fun-loving—“Come on! Come on, sillies, don’t be afraid, just do exactly what I do. You’ll see, it’ll be fun!” she would urge us—and so she thought being sick, like everything else, should be as much fun as possible. To that end, she would get in bed with us herself and read aloud until she was hoarse, or show us how to crayon and watercolor and finger-paint, which we adored because not only was she talented at doing all of them herself, but at teaching us how, too.

Father was as fun-loving as Mother, but his idea of fun was not necessarily the same. It certainly wasn’t living in Connecticut. But he tried. He decided to take up baking bread. Sunday was Father’s bread-baking day and he spent most of it in the kitchen sprinkling flour everywhere and waiting for his dough to rise. “Now here comes the best part,” he would say, punching away at the contents of three or four gigantic bowls. “God, that feels good.” We would hang around the kitchen with him on the pretext of keeping him company, for which he was openly grateful; what we were really after, pushing and shoving each other from side to side (“Okay, kids, cut that out and make it snappy!” Father would say, snapping his fingers at us for emphasis), was the first look when the loaves came out of the oven and the first taste when they were cool enough to tear apart and slather with fresh butter. Bill, who was born during food rationing and had never seen butter before, used to eat it by the handful and considered the bread an intrusion. Father became such an expert at baking bread that he moved on to croissants and brioches. Popular demand, however, forced him back to the old plain white loaf.

He also had a brief fling at carpentry. Since one of the barns was a workshop, equipped with an assortment of every imaginable kind of tool, and since Father was naturally attracted to equipment
and collections (although usually of a more sophisticated nature), one day he found himself out there puttering around. After several trips to the hardware store—to him, the most stimulating place within miles—for the purchase of some extraneous saws, he ambitiously started work on his first and last project: he tried to lower a side table he’d found in the barn to a reasonable coffee-table height. With measuring tapes and levelers and two sawhorses and a big vise and a splendid array of saws, he began; first one table leg and then another, around and around, down to the specified length; then, unable to get them exactly even, he sawed on, cursing, a quarter of an inch at a time, until the table leveled off without wobbling, two inches above the floor.

Father began to reach the point where, from tedium, he took desperate measures. One day Paul Osborn, who lived only five miles away (a blessing), came over for a visit and located Father on the screened porch, looking off into space. “Christ, I’m bored,” said Father. “Paul, do you want to have some fun?” “Yeah,” answered Paul, unable to imagine what Father had in mind. “Come on,” said Father urgently; they went upstairs and while Paul watched, Father systematically, bedroom by bedroom, took down all the flowered lace curtains, gathered them up in a huge bundle, carried them down to the laundry room, and stuffed them in the Bendix washing machine. He shut the door, which had a big glass observation window in it, pressed the button, and said, “Now watch—all hell’s going to break loose in a minute,” and the two of them stood there and watched while the wad of curtains was pumped round and round and round.

The more bored Father became with life on the farm, the more fervently Mother threw herself into every aspect of it: the vegetable garden, the flower garden, the apple orchard, the peach and cherry orchard, the maple trees and the squirrels in them, the welfare of the livestock, the pigs and chickens, the maintenance of the heavy machinery, barns, tools, the harvesting of corn and alfalfa, the making of butter and ice cream, the curing of beef and bacon, and even the lives of Andrew Tomashek, the Czechoslovakian farmer, and his eleven children.

Andrew was in charge of everything. He lived up on the main road overlooking the alfalfa field in a small, teeming, ramshackle house. Of his eleven children, Young Andrew, at twelve, was the oldest. Young Andrew, also his main assistant, was shyly
omnipresent and well muscled; I immediately replaced the memory of Tarquin Olivier with dreams of Young Andrew, whose taciturn behavior I mistook for unspoken desire. Although Mother had hoped that eight-year-old Cyril Tomashek would be a good playmate for us, he scotched that possibility by committing, one pleasant morning, the most heinous act I had ever witnessed. I had a pet squirrel, Mr. Duchin, who fell, newly born, from a maple tree the day we arrived at Stone Ledges, in what was indisputedly a good-luck omen, and whom I had nursed to healthy maturity with the same maternal solicitude Bridget showed for her dolls. Mr. Duchin grew up to assume a position of lordly privilege and was given his own private screened porch to sleep on; the rest of the time he went everywhere I went, perched on my head or shoulder, scampering up and down my bare back and tracking it with fine white scratches, and begging for nuts as he clicked his sharp little rodent’s teeth, which amused everyone except Father. “Get that goddamn weasel out of here!” he’d exclaim as Mr. Duchin joyously leaped around the house, showing off; “you know I’m allergic to him.” Cyril Tomashek stopped by the screened porch one morning at feeding time to watch me idly scattering nuts and raisins around. We said hello; he was always aggressively shy with me, though fascinated. Remembering Mother’s instructions, and feeling, at that moment, as if I had the upper hand socially, I chatted away at him to put him at his ease. It worked. From the corner of my eye I observed him edging closer and closer. Suddenly, his hand flashed out and grabbed Mr. Duchin from my shoulder by his beautiful tail. I screeched and clawed at him, but Cyril fended me off laughing, and playfully began twirling Mr. Duchin around his head like a lasso. In the ensuing fracas, he dragged all three of us out the door. In a flash, Mr. Duchin was gone, streaking toward the maple tree out of which he’d fallen as a baby. Halfway up he stopped and chattered ferociously at us, switching his mangled tail, then made his way toward the dense foliage, which rustled for a minute and closed around him like water around a stone. He never came back, although we called him for days, and I never spoke to Cyril Tomashek again, despite his sullen apologies.

At Stone Ledges, when, as part of Mother’s program of general participation, Bridget, Bill, and I were graduated to the dining-room table for all our meals, an era began. It was a new game with a new set of rules, in which sitting around the dining-room
table under Mother’s aegis became a vital experience. The rules were: perfect manners, excellent appetites, and stimulating non-stop conversation. Even when—especially when—one of the three rules was broken, the dynamics of the situation were interesting. Our dining-room table was a big round pine one that could seat as many as twelve, with a revolving lazy Susan on which all the serving dishes were placed (so that we had to contain ourselves from spinning it around and snatching at food as it went by); it was built by slaves in the South before the Civil War, and Mother, who came from Virginia, never relinquished that innate pride Southerners have about anything to do with their heritage.

The rule about our manners was partially enforced by Father (at Mother’s insistence that he become more involved), who, loathing all forms of disciplinary action because of
his
father, would reach across the table with a huge paddle that he kept by his chair and, in what we all knew was a self-mocking gesture, rap the offender lightly on the head. The next rule, good appetites, was hard for anyone to enforce, because Bridget and Bill were such impossible eaters. They both were finicky and slow, and always had been. I had memories of Bridget as a tiny child, all alone at the long table in The Barn—while I rode in circles around her on my tricycle, having long since finished my breakfast—unable to touch her boiled eggs. She hated them, she couldn’t get them down, they were too soft and runny; there was mucus in them, horrible stringy white stuff that made her gag when she tried to swallow. Whatever nurse we had then—it was before Emily—would make her sit at the table until she finished every mouthful. One day she refused to eat her eggs and sat, looking down at her plate, through the entire morning, my lunch, the afternoon, and my dinner. I protested: the nurse was mean, I was lonely and had nobody to play with, the eggs were all cold and hard and how could anybody want to eat them? They would make Bridget sick to her stomach, they made me sick just to look at them, and I would tell Mother. The nurse rapped me on the knuckles with a spoon, I burst into tears, Bridget burst into tears, and we were both sent to bed. Bridget’s eating habits did not improve, especially when Bill got old enough to keep her company, but not until Connecticut, when they actively affected the whole family three times a day, did Mother step in personally. It was quite a challenge. By that time, Bridget and Bill had become adept at scooping whole platefuls of food into their napkins with
lightning speed and stealthily discarding the refuse after dinner. They had to be watched closely. Once, when Bridget was sick in bed for about a week and all her meals were brought up to her on a tray, it was remarked that she had never, despite her illness, displayed such an extraordinary appetite; every single dish was sent back to the kitchen licked clean. Mother and Father were so proud they drove into New Milford to buy her a doll, but before they could present it to her, Emily gave our room a thorough cleaning and discovered, under Bridget’s bed, the accumulation of an entire week’s meals. Instead of the doll, Bridget got a spanking. When all punishment failed to make a dent, Mother decided the best solution was a full-out reward system. She drew up two identical charts on sheets of cardboard, of which the middle parts were as compartmentalized—with a series of carefully ruled horizontal and vertical pencil lines—as graph paper, and the borders as lavishly decorated with flora and fauna as the pages of a medieval Book of Hours. She tacked these up on the dining-room walls. According to the speed with which Bridget and Bill were able to devour all their breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day (the charts were subdivided into meals, days, weeks, and months), their progress was studded with stars—red, green, blue, silver, and gold—each color representing a higher degree of achievement. Although neither of them ever received a gold star, this system produced results and a great deal of rivalry.