Impossible Vacation (2 page)

Then that night, or one night shortly after Brewster the monkey boy was born, Mom was sitting by my bed on a summer night at Gram’s house and she was reading to me—no, not so much reading as guiding me through my favorite book, which was almost all pictures and no words. I don’t remember the name of the book, but I remember the story and Mom guiding me through it again that night under my new other self: the strange wooden monkey mask from Bali that hung on the wall above my bed. The story was about a little penguin who lived in the South Pole and was oh so very dissatisfied because he was always so cold and he desperately wanted to escape from all that snow and ice, so he took his few belongings, which included his toothbrush and his bathtub, and he cut away a large piece of ice from the solid ice of the South Pole and began to float off for the South Seas, where I knew Uncle Jib had come from. When that little penguin’s ice block at last got into warmer waters, it began to melt until there was nothing left of it, and the penguin was forced to jump into his bathtub to save himself; and so, jumping into his bathtub, he turned the shower around so that it could take in sea water and spit it out the shower head, and that acted as an ingenious little motor that propelled him to his perfect paradise island, where at last we see him lying in a hammock between
two palm trees, sipping a large glass of lemonade made with fresh lemons, and he’s sweating and fanning himself and he is so dissatisfied because now he is too hot.

I remember being there in bed thinking, or imagining—because back then there was no difference between thinking and imagining—that the island he went to was Bali and that this book, this story that Mom was showing me, was somehow, although I had no words for it then, a lesson about dissatisfaction and the impossibility of ever attaining any earthly paradise. At the same time that monkey mask on the wall was calling me away from our island of roads to some other palm-treed island in my mind. That monkey face was calling me away from Mom.

We all had fun as our wonderful summers blended together in Sakonnet, although I could never lie on that beach again without thinking of Bali. Then after a while I just accepted that as a part of my life, accepted that forever I would always be a little bit in the place that I was not, a little bit in my body and a lot in my imagination.

W
E KEPT RETURNING
to Sakonnet for the summer because Gramma North kept renting a house down there, and then one summer she didn’t, so we stayed at home and swam in the Barrington River, which was not in any way as exciting as the ocean but still it was fun. Dad joined the Barrington Yacht Club, not because we had a yacht, or any boat, but because the yacht club had a little beach and a raft we could swim out to. By then Topher had been born and was two years old, and Mom would lie on the beach and watch us wallow in the water. Mom was always relaxed and happy then. She was the best she ever was whenever she was on a beach. She was even more relaxed than after church. It was as though the water was a god for her. It was as though the water was as important as Jesus, but she’d never admit that. She’d get real nervous and pent-up if she couldn’t make it to the water in the summer.

Although I still had my monkey mask on the wall I had pretty
much forgotten about Bali. I made a secret promise that I’d get there one day, and that secret promise allowed me to swim in the river and have fun in the ocean during all the special times we went there. But sometimes in the winter I’d have fantasies of Bali and how when I was old enough I would join the merchant marine and work my way there on a freighter and then return triumphant with monkey masks and all my dirty laundry in a duffel bag over my shoulder. And Mom would be there at the front gate to greet me and I would tell her about Bali and shower her with gifts from Bali. I would shower her with shawls and cloth of every color and there would be monkey masks for everyone.

Then one summer things went strange. I think I was about nine years old, and that was the summer that I noticed Mom didn’t go to the beach all that often anymore.

That was the summer that Mom first really started to go crazy. I don’t remember it starting slowly that time, all I remember was that it was hot and my brothers and I were in the playroom with our friends from down the street and we would hear Mom cry out from the kitchen. She would cry out all these wild and crazy things. Sometimes it was words or Dad’s name, or she’d cry out, “Jesus save me!” Other times it was just moans and cries. All of a sudden she’d burst into singing Christian Science hymns real loud and all out of tune. It was a cry of madness that seemed to come out of nowhere, and our friends would look at us with this panic in their eyes. Later on in the day she’d be all right. But what was strange (and I don’t think we thought of it as strange then) was that no one ever talked about it. That’s what seems strange now. No one ever mentioned it. Not a word. Neither Dad nor Gram North, who lived with us then, ever took us aside and tried to explain. I guess they were as confused as we were.

Mom was then a fairly devout Christian Scientist, and I suppose this to some extent was causing her to deny the fact that anything was wrong. It was some time during that summer, someone came to tell me—but I don’t remember who, maybe it was Dad or Gram—that the three of us, Topher, Coleman, and I, had to be split up for a while because Mom was real nervous and couldn’t stand us fighting all the time. I didn’t remember us fighting all that much, but if some adult came and said it, it must have been true.

I do remember that I used to hit Coleman a lot in the balls, and when he ran to tell Mom she would tell me, “Never hit Coleman there! Never hit him in that place again!” But I did it over and over again; no matter what she said I still did it, and Cole never hit me back. But he was a lot bigger and heavier than I; and at last one day that summer, he pinned me to the ground and wouldn’t let me up. It was an awful feeling because I couldn’t move and I remember I was kicking and screaming. He said he wouldn’t let me up until I stopped screaming and kicking. And that made me scream and kick all the more. I felt like I was going to explode. I thought the veins in my head would burst. When I stopped moving at last I felt like a statue of myself. I felt like a dead boy—I felt dead! Finally Cole let me up and I went and shut myself in the bedroom and moved my bookcase against the door because we didn’t have any door locks. When Cole came to bang on the door I screamed, “Stay away or I’ll jump! I’ll jump out the window.” I ran to the window. “I’ll kill myself like Milton Berle’s wife!” is what I yelled at Cole that summer that Mom couldn’t stop crying out loud.

I remember standing in that second-story window and looking down, wondering if I really had the courage to jump and if I did would it kill me from such a small height. I think I figured I’d just break a leg or something and end up in a cast for the rest of the summer, and that would be much better than dying because of all the attention I’d get. But then I also realized that Mom wouldn’t be able to give me any attention, because she was cracking up and needed all of it for herself.

Anyway, one day, somebody came to me and said, “You boys are going to have to go away to different places.” I remember that I was sitting alone on a chair on the front porch because it was real hot and you could hear the cicadas (which we called “heat bugs” then). You couldn’t see the heat bugs and yet they were very loud. I was sitting there, dressed only in my blue shorts with white stripes on the side. I was just sitting there picking honeysuckle blossoms from the great honeysuckle vine that covered the whole front of the porch. I was snipping the base of each blossom with my thumbnail and pulling the little stem to try to fill up my father’s one-ounce shot glass with honey, one drop at a time, until perhaps hours or days later I’d have
enough honey for one little sip. I wasn’t fighting with Cole or anything. I wasn’t even trying to jump out the window. I don’t remember where Cole and Topher were, but I do remember that someone came up behind me and said, “You boys are going to have to be separated for the rest of the summer because your Mom can’t stand it anymore.”

Cole went down the road to stay with Gramma Benton. I was to go stay with Gramma North in Sakonnet, where she was living for the summer with a friend. Topher got to stay at home with Mom and Dad. Mom drove me as far as Mount Hope Bridge. And then to save on the two-dollar toll we walked across together to meet Gramma North and her friend Anne. I’d never walked over that bridge before or even dreamed I ever would. We’d driven over it many times on our way to Windmill Hill and the ocean, but no one I knew had ever walked over it. It was very exciting and frightening. About halfway over we heard the voices of men talking underneath and it turned out that they were bridge painters suspended on little swings, painting the bridge just under us. Mom must have been in an all-right mood, because she was real chatty and made joking conversation with them and they whistled and called back and told us to have a good day. The view from that bridge made me dizzy, and the boats looked like toys far below. We met Gram North and her friend Anne on the other side; then Mom walked back across the bridge alone.

I spent the rest of the summer with Gram and Anne and I didn’t like it that much. I didn’t like being all alone with myself and I didn’t like being told what to do by Gram, and most of all, I didn’t like being told what to do by her friend Anne, who was almost a complete stranger to me.

Even going to the ocean with them didn’t help. I missed Mom and Mom’s eyes on me. I would lie on the warm sand with my eyes closed, dreaming of my trip to Bali and, most important, my return from Bali and how Mom would be there at the gate to greet me.

Then when I would go into the ocean I would just lie there at the edge like a limp drowned boy and let the waves wash me in and out. My body would roll into the surf and wash back up again just like a piece of driftwood. This would upset Gram and Anne so much that they would come and scold me. “Don’t do that, Brewster,” they’d
say. “Do not do that. We don’t like it. It frightens us,” they’d cry, each waving a finger at me.

The next thing that I remember was that it was September and I was back home and Mom was not there because she had gone away to a Christian Science rest home. After that, when she had gotten all rested up, she went to spend some time at Gram and Gramp Benton’s down the road from our house. I think she stayed in bed there a lot. When I came to visit her she was in bed in the guest bedroom in the middle of the day. I thought it was strange that Mom would be in bed in the middle of the day when she didn’t even have a cold or a fever or anything like that. She just needed a lot of rest, someone kept saying, and please be quiet, don’t raise your voice. “Your mother got very overtired and she needs a lot of rest to get well.”

It was sometime between October and Thanksgiving when Mom came home again, and that was the time she had something real big and important happen to her. She had what she called “a healing.” She all of a sudden got healed by a vision of Christ coming down into the living room on a shaft of late-morning sunlight. We were all away at school and Dad was at work. I don’t know where Gramma North was, but Mom told me that she was lying on the couch reading from
Science and Health
and then she got all of a sudden very calm and very clear, like the clear calm before a storm, she said. But the storm didn’t follow. Christ came instead. Christ came down a shaft of sunlight almost like he’d slid in on one of those bright, rolling autumn clouds off of Narragansett Bay. He came in on a shaft of light and touched Mom’s feet and touched the palms of her hands, and she was instantaneously healed and filled with joy.

She got so very, very high, she said, like the time she once told me about watching Arturo Toscanini direct the New York Philharmonic in Providence. She said they were playing Tchaikovsky’s
Pathétique
Symphony and she just floated right up out of her body. She floated right up to the ceiling like a ghost of herself looking back down at it all, and saw herself watching the Philharmonic play. So Jesus came and touched Mom with all of his electric love and left, never to return again.

Mom told me this story. And she told me that right after she was
healed she made the mistake of telling Dad about it. It was a mistake to tell him because he doubted it in such a big way that she was poisoned by his doubt and fell back into a nervous collapse, and she had to fight real hard to know the truth again and remember how Christ had touched her. She had to fight hard to keep things to herself, to keep her newfound secrets from Dad.