Impossible Vacation (5 page)

I
CAME HOME FROM
my last year of college to a home that was now inland, or “relatively inland,” as Dad would say. I would not have said “inland” so much as “in the woods.” The new house was surrounded by trees at the end of a dead-end road that stopped at the woods. The name of the dead-end road was Shady Lane, a very apt description.

I don’t know if Dad and Mom picked out that house together, but I assume they did, and with its view of nothing but woods it struck me as a very odd location to move to after living all those years on Narragansett Bay. But at the same time it was a sort of cute and very manageable house, something they could easily retire in, with two baths, a master bedroom downstairs for the coming of old age, two bedrooms upstairs for when we were at home, and a two-car garage attached so no one had to walk out of the house to get into their car during foul weather.

By the time I arrived at the new house Dad had pretty much moved in all by himself and was slowly beginning to unpack and start a new life in spite of the fact that Mom was away at the sanitarium. I had just graduated and had brought my sensuous college girlfriend Melissa home with me, but it wasn’t working out very well. I think Dad was jealous. He made us sleep in separate rooms and kept a constant ear out for any odd sounds, which made me feel very inhibited. I kept trying to drag Melissa into the woods to make love but she would have none of it. She was not the outdoor type. I did manage to eat her once while she lay on a moss-covered rock, but the mosquitoes and Dad calling us in for a rare steak dinner cut it short before
either of us could really complete ourselves. At college we had been sexually voracious together, but now all I was getting was Melissa’s annoyance at how I was treating her like a sex object. She said, “You only pay attention to me when you want to get laid.” I knew she was right. Now that I was home, or rather at Dad’s new home, about to be Mom’s new home as well, I began to realize that I didn’t need Melissa as a friend because I still had Mom. I was just waiting for Mom to get out of that rest home so I could talk with her. I wanted Melissa for my physical needs and Mom for my emotional needs. And although Melissa didn’t openly talk about that split in me, I think she intuited it and reacted accordingly by withholding her sweet body favors.

We said goodbye with no real plans to reconnect. We were just living our lives as if we’d go on forever, and ever be young. I drove Melissa to the Block Island ferry and she was off for a summer of fun and waitressing on Block Island.

The next week I was called up for my army physical. I made up my mind right away that I was simply going to act crazy, or because I had the perfect role model, I was just going to act like Mom. I had to start convincing myself that I was crazy, which was a tricky little game because if you’re not careful, pretty soon you don’t know if you
are
crazy or if you’re just playing at it. I would actually go off into the woods and rehearse my madness like I was getting ready to play King Lear. As a kid I used to go off into the woods to hunt or masturbate, or on calmer days just to walk and enjoy and try to teach myself how to hang out. But now I was going off into the woods to shout and roll on the ground and act crazy. Besides preparing me to beat the draft, this became a wonderful sort of organic release, as though I was creating my own therapy. Sometimes I’d even bring a tambourine along with me and end up dancing in my underwear or naked like some demented shaman. That was only when I was deep in the woods and felt really alone. Most of the time I had the feeling someone was watching me. Maybe God was there watching me.

I beat the draft the morning Mom came home from the sanitarium. I almost didn’t beat it, because someone who had a beard like mine went a little crazy right in front of me. I must say his act wasn’t
as good. He probably hadn’t rehearsed it. I didn’t know who was crazier, us naked guys with our cheeks spread or the men who had to walk up and down looking at our assholes, which at the time made me realize all I should have done was not wipe myself that morning and I’d be out of America’s fight against communism forever. But that didn’t occur to me until I was bent over and spread. So there I was in the line just after we’d had our holes checked and we had just reached the head sergeant and the guy in front of me started barking like a dog. This immediately triggered my wild-Indian act and we both started doing this naked dance together. We were immediately led away to a little room where we were told with great disdain to get dressed and go home. While we were dressing, we both recognized that we had created a great male bonding. We had beat the draft by dancing naked together, and we laughed a lot about this. He told me his name was Joe McCreedy and he was off to New Paltz, New York, to try to open a bookstore. It was going to be a fantastic “alternative bookstore,” as he called it, and if ever there was a place for me he would give me a job. I wished him good luck and gave him a fond farewell and headed out to hitchhike home, but ended up walking most of the six miles, which was fine with me because I was in no hurry to do anything anymore.

That same day Gram and Gramp brought Mom down from the sanitarium in their car. Dad had spent the whole weekend fixing up the house so that it would be all nice and orderly for her. But I could tell as soon as Mom stepped out of the backseat of that black four-door Ford that something was never going to work again. It was as though she was trying to be happy, or acting happy, in the way I had acted crazy that very morning. It was as though she had sat there in that backseat all the way home from the sanitarium saying over and over to herself, “I’m going to be happy in this new house. I’m going to be happy in this new house.” But there was a certain way she looked through me to the other side of nothing that made me feel I wasn’t there. It was a certain frantic flicker in her eyes. It was as though a bird was in her head—a bird that wanted to get out. It was as though a bird had stolen my mother’s soul or that her soul was a bird and I was only seeing it for the first time.

W
HILE MOM WAS AWAY
at the institution Dad, to his credit, had realized that maybe part of Mom’s breakdown had to do with their moving away from Narragansett Bay. He even tried to buy the old house back from the new owners, but they would hear nothing of it. Oh, they were sympathetic, of course, but they weren’t going to move. They told Dad that Mom’s missing the bay was only a symptom of some larger problem. What could be a larger problem than Narragansett Bay, except for the ocean? I wondered. Perhaps a woman might miss a bay so much that it would drive her mad. Only the Narragansett Indians would know about that one, and they were all gone. Maybe Mom was a reincarnation of a Narragansett Indian, I began to muse. Maybe she tapped into that bay so much that she became the bay, but had no words for her condition. What does “I miss the bay” really mean? It all depends on who’s saying it, right? And when Mom said it I trembled. We all trembled.

Dad had the good sense to rent a bathhouse for Mom down on the coast at Bonnet Shore. Of course that was not the same as stepping out on your lawn and having your head open up over the bay, but at least it was the ocean. We had to drive forty-five minutes to get there, which was a problem because we had to go down Route 2, by Rhode Island standards a rather fast and crowded highway. I could see how driving on that road could make Mom real confused, especially since she was on some sort of medication and had just returned from electroshock treatments. So I always drove her to the beach. She hadn’t made any friends yet on this side of the bay, and I couldn’t bear seeing her go alone. But the truth was, I was sure she wouldn’t make it to the beach by herself.

On nice summer days we’d try to go to the beach as often as we could. At first the shock treatments seemed to be working pretty well, because except for that occasional bird flutter in her eye, she apparently was coping, which put Dad at ease. So Mom and I had a few days that
were actually quite relaxed. We lay on the beach and dozed in the sun, both catching up with our much-needed sleep while the distant waves and children’s voices played like lulling music in our ears.

But some time around the second week Mom was home, it slowly started up again. The effects of the shock treatments were wearing off. She turned on those old what-ifs, those old maybe-I-should-haves, the regret mechanism. She’d say things like “Maybe I should have been a better mother” or “Do you really think I did that?” or “Maybe I should have gone to Spain to visit Cole when he first went there and I had the time and money, when I had saved all that money to go and visit him” or “Maybe I shouldn’t have stolen you boys away from your father.” She’d turn to me and say, “Do you think I stole you away from your father? Do you think I was a good mother?” These questions made me very uneasy and confused. Deep down inside I thought that if she’d been a good mother I’d be able not to be there, I’d be off with my own woman. I would have been able to have flown the nest by then. I wanted in the worst way to fly, just fly this nest and get out, but I still couldn’t.

When I was sixteen and Cole was nineteen, Mom would sometimes take a bath in the upstairs bathroom and not lock the door, and Cole and I, instead of using the downstairs bathroom, would go upstairs to pee while we looked over our shoulder at her. It was like this odd kind of peep show. She’d let us look as long as we wanted, which was never very long: before we could get a good and steady look, Dad would come to the bottom of the stairs shouting, “Are you fellows”—Dad always called us “fellows” when reprimanding us—“are you fellows up there in that bathroom with your mother again? I don’t like that one bit, and I don’t want to have to come up there!” Dad didn’t like it. That was one of the few things I can remember him ever thinking was wrong.

On those frantic summer nights after her return from the sanitarium, I would often try to calm Mom down by taking her to the movies, just to get us both out of the house and give Dad some relief. There were no new Bergman films around, and Mom had recently seen
The Sound of Music
at the sanitarium. So one night I made a big mistake. I took Mom to see the recently released film of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
She wanted to go because she had this fascination
with the life and death of Virginia Woolf. I’m not sure that she knew Virginia Woolf’s books all that well, but she did know the story of how Woolf ended her life by filling her pockets with rocks and walking into a river. She seemed to know that story as well as she knew the story of how Hart Crane, one depressed morning, walked off the stern of his cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico, never to be seen again. At the time I didn’t know what effect that film would have on Mom. I did notice how quiet she was as we rode home, but I didn’t find out how disturbed she really was until Dad told me the following morning. He said, “I think you took your mother to the wrong movie last night. She’s so upset that we may have to take her back to the institution.” At the time I felt like saying, “Well, why didn’t
you
take her to the movies, then?
You
choose a good one for her to see.” Outside of
The Ten Commandments
, which wasn’t on the summer circuit that year, I didn’t know what to choose. Some years back I had taken Mom to see
The Ten Commandments
and she had loved it.

Well, it did turn out that
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
was a real mistake, because Mom completely identified with the role of Martha, which was played by Elizabeth Taylor. In fact Dad told me that Mom thought she was Martha the next morning. She went into one of those funky tailspins. I had to spend that next beautiful summer day indoors with her while she flew around the house like a frightened bird again, like that bird that couldn’t get out. That was a bad day. I remember it well because that was the day when she told me right out how she planned to do it, how she planned to do away with herself.

That whole morning she was pulling her hair and picking at her ears until they bled. She had a little bald spot now, at the back of her head, from tearing her hair out, just like people do in the movies when they’re supposed to be going mad. I would try to calm her down by reading to her from my favorite book at the time, Alan Watts’s
Psychotherapy, East and West
, but this didn’t seem to help at all. She wanted to read from
Science and Health
but she couldn’t sit still long enough to read. So at last, some time in mid-morning when she seemed about ready to pop, Mom began calling her Christian Science practitioner on the phone and she just stood there repeating after him what he told her, which seemed to be rather incoherent passages from
Science and Health
. I was never sure what it was he was saying to her because
Mom would repeat it all in halting confusion—things like “Error is unreal because untrue, all reality is in God and His creation harmonious and eternal. That which He creates is good and He makes all that is made.” Then there was a long sentence which Mom was barely able to repeat back to him because she was too distracted, perhaps by the raving image of Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in her mind, but she was able to get it out just once and she said it slowly back to him like a child trying to memorize a secret code. She said it once, all the way through: “Therefore the only reality of sin, sickness, and death is the awful fact that unrealities seem real to the human erring belief, until God strips off their disguise.” The practitioner went on as Mom paced and pulled and stretched the phone cord until it almost broke, almost pulling the phone off the wall as she repeated the next phrase: “The science of mind disposes of all evil. Truth, God, is not the father of error. Man is not matter, he is spirit. Man is made in the image and likeness of God.” Then the practitioner hung up and Mom held the phone and looked at it with this crazy scowl, like a little kid who finally managed after years to get in touch with Santa Claus on the telephone and, right in the middle of asking for everything she ever wanted, got cut off.