Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (11 page)

Upstairs she dropped me on my bed and slapped me before she told me that this was for taking our mom away. She started for the door, but stopped and pointed at me for the second time that day. “And if you think you’re coming downstairs again, think twice.”

The door slammed and all that was left was the rhythm of pounding feet on stairs against the thumping of a distant basketball from outside, and the fading voices of a thinning crowd now gathered in the kitchen. They were saying goodbye. Mom was still in the house, and I couldn’t be with her.

Because I hadn’t been able to rein myself in, I had only that horrific scene to remember as my goodbye. I hated myself for what I had done. I would pay in the nights ahead, my siblings’ blame leveled at me. Opening the door, I listened from my bed to a tangle of voices, none of which was Mom’s. I was sure that Mom had already forgotten me while the others talked about baseball—a ploy, no doubt, to distract her from the pain of saying goodbye to her children. Soon the voices moved out to the back porch, so that I was hearing them from the direction of Frankie’s room, which overlooked the basketball court. The kids from the Pickle game ran to the basketball court. “Goodbye! Goodbye!” Their voices were gloomy but somehow noble. Why couldn’t I have done that?

I heard car doors open; the Campbells said goodbye. Pulling the lavender-upholstered chair to the window, I watched them descend the slope of our front yard to cross the street. Mr. Campbell had his arm at his wife’s waist. She fell into his shoulder momentarily, then righted herself. Next to the Campbells’ was the congressman’s house, and in the distant space between the two houses I could see Frankie’s friend Stilts playing basketball on his court with his sister, Scooter, a girl my age who was the best athlete in our class.

I heard the Campbells call goodbye from their front door, as Dad and Mom and the priests descended our driveway. I knew the car’s trajectory, having taken that drive so many times to the leg man and doctors’ appointments. The car would head down Winton Road, the main line out of our neighborhood, connecting to Clifton and over to Vine, which was the dividing line between east and west in our city. Vine would lead them uphill just shy of Walnut Hills, where Mom had grown up. It was as if she would go back in time to merge again with her roots, and it would be like she’d never had a life here.

I heard all of that happening, although I couldn’t see anything. Pulling the chair closer, I pressed my nose to the window screen and pushed against it to catch a glimpse of the car rolling backward onto the street, gears shifting, steering wheel rotating, before its launch forward. If I could just see it rocking back before that lurching motion ...

Once I heard the motor fade away, I went to my bed.

I was there forever, or maybe just a minute, before the thump of Stilts’s basketball died. It happened just after the ball hit the rim. I jerked my head toward his backyard court. His sister Scooter clamped a hand to her nose while the ball rolled away and Stilts raced toward her. The ball must have come down hard on her face. I couldn’t imagine her getting hit because Scooter was brilliant at handling the ball in any game. She made only the trace of a shrill cry. Maybe because she’d been playing so long with boys, she’d learned to stifle her pain. It was one of the loneliest sounds I’d ever heard.

I turned my attention back to my room, to its stillness, and the separation between sunlight and shadows. Dust filled that strip of light in the window, making it appear denser than the cool shadows on either side. Outside, the sun cut into the trees around the abandoned basketball court, creating an exquisite sunset, brutally so, but I kept waiting for it to vanish so that the room would be equal again, no more separation between light and shadow. Then, at least, there would be the promise of darkness.

CHAPTER 9

Out of Nowhere

M
om was released from the hospital after three months, and that news arrived as gloriously as a war coming to an end. We’d all worried that she was lost to us forever. Then she was at home again, back at the stove. She was doing all the same things she’d done before the hospital, only slower and vacantly.

Two years after her release, we were still missing our slick mother with her razor-sharp comebacks. The woman in her place was reading Graham Greene and Camus. She chain-smoked with jittery fingers. Her voice went from tremble to shriek. She no longer walked; she careened.

For a good while, Mom probably took sedatives. Once lithium became available she steadily improved, and of course there was talk therapy. She hated it. On top of that she feared elevators, making it nearly impossible to go to her psychiatrist’s office on the seventh floor, although I don’t remember that problem coming up in other places, such as department stores. She had one consistent fear, though, and that was airplanes. Even before her hospitalization, she had been known to drop to her knees and pray the rosary in the aisle of a small plane.

Over those two years, Mom’s changes had come gradually. The most obvious one was her confusion about God. During the sixties, she had delivered strident monologues in beauty salons and at the A&P:
Is that what we’re paying all this tuition for? Questions? If those Jesuits are so smart, why don’t they have ans
wers
?

In 1966
Time
magazine had asked, “Is God dead?” To which Mom had responded, “Absolutely not!”

Now, in 1970, Mom was deeply conflicted, and God was at the core of that crisis. She seemed to read every situation as an indictment of her worth as a mother, a wife, a woman, and a human being. We would see this even in the way that she chastised us. “And just
who
do you think
you
are?” she would say to one of us, but she sounded so beaten down that it was as if she were getting ready to punish herself.

Meanwhile, Dad juggled a car dealership and eleven kids while toting me to prosthetic appointments and running interference for Mom. I was ten and old enough to see that we had fallen from our place: the proud family on the hill. Our screened-in porch had always been full of perfumed ladies and Jesuits clinking Waterford tumblers of Irish Mist. We still had our aunts and uncles, our grandparents, and the Campbells. They never abandoned us, but Mom had lost some close friends. What she probably missed most of all was bridge. This last was a tender mercy; her concentration was shot.

Finally, the priests stopped coming to our Sunday gatherings. This happened once Mom took her complaints about the clergy to the priests themselves. (Her illness would escalate so that in another year’s time, when I was in sixth grade, Mom would show up at the rectory, ranting to the pastor about the devil—which was the catalyst for another three-month stay in a locked ward and more shock treatments.)

In my twenties, I would ask Mom to describe a manic episode. In essence, she said: People don’t realize that you remember all of it afterward. You know what you said and what you did, but you could no more stop yourself from doing it than you can undo any of it once it’s done.

At ten I had only a vague idea of the complexity of Mom’s illness and how, or if, it was affected by my being born without legs. Then, on a sweltering afternoon the summer before I entered the fifth grade, I came inside to find Mom sitting at the kitchen table with Michael’s dog-eared copy of
The Fall
. Her fingers shook as she inhaled from a cigarette with an inch-long ash, and yet her leaden eyes were grounded. She was lucid enough to not be psychotic but she was still in a netherworld of her psyche, even if not tortured by it.

This was a couple years after my mother thought she was Jesus Christ and one year before she ranted at our pastor. I hadn’t read Camus yet and wouldn’t have understood his meaning, but I did know what Mom tended to say of such a book: if the Jesuits were going to hand a boy a book in which people questioned God, they were just “asking for it.” So I was surprised when she glanced over the curled pages to say, “He’s talking about suicide, about whether to live or die.” With her eyes and her voice so matter-of-fact, in contrast to her trembling fingers, she was appealing to me to take her seriously, to forget the worry associated with a word such as “suicide,” and instead to explore it with her momentarily. Briefly, I glimpsed inside Joy and found the would-be artist, the woman who recounted conversations from the locked ward with the insight of a sage. “I don’t think you’re paranoid,” she had told the patient with paranoid delusions. “In fact, everyone
is
watching you.”

Then there was my perspective as the not-so-average ten-year-old girl: I yearned for a mother who would contemplate darkness, eager as I was to have a substantive talk about my legs and what that meant for my life, even if the discussion was deeply confused. On the word “suicide,” I pulled up a chair, starved for details.

There is another angle to this moment, which I’d like to forget yet, in all honesty, must include. That is Mom’s distortion of Camus’ story. It was right there in her description of the scene at the bridge. She talked as if
the protagonist
contemplated suicide. Until I read the book, later, I didn’t realize that it was
an unidentified woman
who jumped from the bridge, and that the protagonist was merely a witness. I didn’t know that afterward, in an effort to quell his guilt, the protagonist ranted about people with visual or other impairments (people who even today are called “invalids” by some, or, more universally, “disabled”). Having since read the book myself, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I cling to that intimate moment with Mom, and yet because of her misreading of the story, I want to demand from that woman sitting in our kitchen several decades ago the real story: “What exactly do you think of this man’s rage toward the blind, the crippled, and the homeless? Do you ever think about what it means for me to be without legs?” During this brief window she might have shared her deepest feelings, but after that it would be pointless to ask my mother those questions. She would have fallen back on the usual lines: “What do I think of that man on the bridge? I think he ought to talk to a priest ... What do I think of your legs? Who said you were
differ
ent
?”

As for the idea of someone taking their own life, I think my mother’s concept of suicide probably never changed over time. She thought that only someone else could stop a person from committing suicide. In Mom’s case, that was Dad.

I hated to imagine relying on another person. What if I reached out and there was no one there to stop me? I looked at Mom. Who would stop her if Dad wasn’t there?

T
here was just one week left before fifth grade started, and I was probably more preoccupied with who would be my teacher than what Mom thought about suicide or disability. I was afraid I might land in Sister Luke’s fifth-grade class. Sister Luke was about Mom’s age, forty-something, and now after the six o’clock Mass every morning Mom was taking her for coffee at Daily Donuts.

Around school, Sister Luke was notorious for identifying her pets and pariahs. She left no room for those in between, sometimes vilifying the very person she’d been grooming as her pet. In her fourth-grade religion class, I had been her pet, which meant that in fifth grade I would have nowhere to go but down. I couldn’t tell Mom my fears, though, because Sister Luke was now Mom’s best friend. Anyway, Mom would not have seen this pet/pariah issue as a problem. She’d say it was the job of a nun “to keep you guessing.”

Others were afraid of Sister Luke because of her eccentricity. Tall and sinewy, Sister Luke’s shoulders curled forward, and she gathered her students with a menacing blow of her whistle before turning her back to the rows of children and darting toward the fifth-grade hall in a side-to-side waddle, oblivious to the thirty miniature penguins in her wake. Eccentricity was not a problem for me. While other Catholic girls my age were monitoring their public image, desperate not to stand out as “freaks”—which in 1970 only meant hippies—I had abandoned any hope of popularity, and with my wooden legs I was lucky to be considered “normal.” I even had access to the lunch table of the popular girls, although my place had always been at the farthest edge. Although I was never the one girls raced to sit next to, I wasn’t the girl others warded off by throwing their trays into the empty spot and saying, “This one’s taken.” I would never have tried to sit by an insider. Instead I found companionship with the less athletic girls—girls with good grooming, intelligence, and adequate social skills

For her eccentricity, I might have applauded Sister Luke. It was the pet/pariah issue that disturbed me. In our fourth-grade religion class, she named me president, which made me the collector of UNICEF money. At first I was flattered, but then she forced me to go around the room and shake each person’s orange box with its faces of starving children. Based on the robustness of each shaken box, we would bear witness to the student’s generosity or stinginess. If the box contained only a paltry handful of pennies, this act would amplify its owner’s inadequacies. All too often I had to hold up someone’s near-empty box as its owner slumped over the desk while the class heckled them.

Adding to the angst were Sister Luke’s slideshows. They each had the same browbeaten male voice narrating parables. A woeful beep would alert her to advance the slide. I was haunted by the story of Saul. In one slide he was a tax collector; in another he was being chased by an angry mob. Finally, he was up in a tree with the crowd jeering, “Saul, come down from that tree!” That slide bothered me the most because, as Sister Luke’s UNICEF boss, I was in danger of becoming Sister Luke’s Saul.

Like most Catholics, she revered the New Testament. I wondered at times if she had memorized it because she barely consulted the page while reciting whole stories aloud:
Then Jesus looked to the apostle he loved mo
s
t
...

Sister Luke’s most vexing trait was her whisper. She spoke so quietly that you had to lean in to hear her. She always greeted me with a slight bow, her bent shoulders dipping as if weighted by a yoke. Her eyes would stay fixed as she bowed, unyielding.