Riding Fury Home (11 page)

I have one cloudy memory of going to visit Mom: There was the buzz of the locked door as Dad and I were admitted to the maximum-security ward, the walk down a long, empty green hall that went on forever and ever, and the smell of Lysol. No memory of my mother, her smell, her embrace; no remembrance of the greeting or the parting.

 

 

YEARS LATER, MY FATHER told me his part of the story. After the ambulance took my mother to the emergency room, someone called him at work to come to the hospital. When he got there, Gloria was on a gurney in the hall, making incoherent sounds, grunts and groans. Her sister, Rita, was with her, and she stepped toward Abe, blocking him from going close to Gloria. Rita said to him, “Glor wants a divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty!”

Dad glared at her, “Whose cruelty? Mine or
hers?!”

Gloria was now moaning, “Ah, ah, ahhhhhhh!”

“Okay, okay,” Dad said, “I'll agree to it.” He turned and left.

Several days later, the hospital called him to come get Gloria and deliver her to the county mental hospital. He was, after all, still the husband, separated or not. As he drove, she sat glumly next to him in the passenger seat.

There's a gap in my memory: Was I out playing with a friend the day that my grandparents drove up with my mother? Or did I greet her as she stepped from my grandparents' Oldsmobile, and wrap my arms around her? She'd been gone over two months. The adults were
having a meeting in the living room, and if I was home, they must have sent me out of earshot. My father listened while Mom's parents made a proposal: Move back for good, Abe, and raise Karen.

My mother had been staying at my grandparents' since her discharge, but they didn't want her to keep living with them—I imagine her despair was too great for them. Gloria would be committed to a mental hospital or a halfway house. While my mother was being discussed, she sat mute and unprotesting, as if resigned to a life locked away. My father told me he got mad at her parents and said, “If you do this, it will be the end of Gloria!” He made a counterproposal: Let Gloria move back, and Karen will be with her and look after her, and I will move away again.

And that is what they did.

 

 

AT NIGHT MY VIGILANCE returned as easily as turning on a radio to a pretuned channel. I was programmed to startle awake to any sounds of my mother stumbling down the hall on her bathroom forays. But during the day, my interests were elsewhere; I was swept up in eighth grade, homework, piano practice, playing guitar, and riding my bike the several miles to my new best friend Theresa's house. Theresa had long, dirty-blond hair that she chewed on, a tall, chunky body, and a great smile. Best of all, she was very bright and like I did, loved art. We had animated conversations about books and artists we liked, and ideas we were batting around in our heads. Barbie and I had drifted apart, our friendship lost to her obsession with her looks and with dating boys. So it was amazing to find another girl who was intellectual. We talked about all kinds of things—except, of course, my mother's depression and what it was like for me to live alone with her.

Theresa lived in a small cottage with her many siblings and both parents. Because her house was crammed with people, to get privacy we would walk out into the empty fields near her house, or along the railroad tracks. Immersed in conversation, under the big sky, with clouds scudding overhead, I would feel big and expansive, my body vibrating with energy. I had never felt such freedom and joy in sharing my thoughts with another girl.

 

 

NOT LONG AFTER MOM came home, she heard about a doctor who practiced alternative medicine. He kept wacky hours, seeing patients at his office in Trenton from midnight to six in the morning. Mom left me at my grandparents' house, checked into a motel in Trenton, and roused herself for her 4:00 AM appointment. The doctor diagnosed her with severe hypoglycemia and low thyroid, and gave her armloads of vitamins, thyroid medication, and a regimen for reducing some of her psychiatric drugs. Although still addicted to sleeping pills at night, she became less groggy in the daytime.

Mom was rumbling back to life. Years later, she would tell me how defective she had felt when she knew her marriage was ending, like there was something really wrong with her. Somehow she decided to go on. That winter semester, she enrolled in a master's of education program to become an elementary-school teacher. Sometimes I helped with her projects. One day, I came home to find her seated in front of a large blown-up balloon resting on the table, a bucket of papier-mâché next to it. Her ashtray was filled with cigarette stubs, and one smoking cigarette rested on its edge. “Hon, can you help me? I don't have the patience.” She was supposed to make a globe. I loved anything to do with art, and I launched in, spreading newspaper on the table under the balloon, layering the papier-mâché
around it. After it dried, I painted the continents in green, the ocean in blue, happy to have such a simple way to help Mom.

 

 

IN THE SPRING OF 1965, American planes started the bombing raids on North Vietnam dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder, and Mom joined Women Strike for Peace. It threw me into a dilemma: Did I think the war was wrong? In 1965 there was no large peace movement yet, and I knew no other kids who were against the war. I sought out advice from my eighth-grade teacher, Mr. Shelton, whom I adored. He wasn't handsome, but I thought he was the greatest because he challenged his students to think. I hadn't yet learned to dampen my smartness in deference to boys, and I was one of those students always furiously raising a hand. One day after class, I asked Mr. Shelton what he thought about Vietnam. He wouldn't answer. He told me that I had to learn about Vietnam myself and come to my own conclusion. I begged, I pleaded, “What do you think?” but he kept pushing me; “This isn't a decision someone else can make for you. You have to delve into it, and then decide what you believe.”

Mr. Shelton's respect for my reasoning abilities made me face the responsibility. It was a scary decision. I hesitated because in some vague way I understood that once I concluded that America was not the righteous purveyor of freedom, many beliefs I'd been taught would come tumbling down.

I had stared at the newspaper pictures of Vietnamese Buddhist monks protesting by immolating themselves in the Saigon streets. Puzzled, horrified, and moved by such an act, I was led by the intensity of those pictures to research more. Mom had bought a couple of books about Vietnam. Reading about the history of foreign interventions
in Vietnam and the escalating U.S. role, I became clear. Mr. Shelton was right—I could figure out what I believed. I joined Mom on the picket line.

In front of the New Brunswick Army induction center, there were the handful of Women Strike for Peace housewives marching with picket signs held aloft with one arm, their huge pocketbooks crooked on the opposite elbow, and me, the sole adolescent. I felt nervous and exposed marching along the sidewalk, but also angry about the war and proud to be taking action. For the first time, I witnessed these women as more than housewives and parents. Mom had found kindred spirits, passionate women, committed to a cause.

I decided the United States had not simply made a mistake in Vietnam, but that our foreign policy was deliberately
imperialist
—a word I'd just learned. By then, I had watched black people being attacked by police with fire hoses and police dogs in the Birmingham demonstrations on TV. Right here in America, things were very wrong. But I also saw how courageous people could be, standing up against oppression, and that there was hope for change.

I put away my horse books and launched into reading to deepen my understanding of the world. I read
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Diary of Ann Frank, 1984, The Trial, The Grapes of Wrath, The Crucible, The Jungle,
and
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
The books widened me, touched me with human experiences that were so different from mine, yet so reverberant with our human pathos.

At meals, Mom and I now discussed politics, history, and current events. I discovered something about my mother, something that had been buried by drugs and depression, lost to electroshock and sorrow in the years since she had read me Greek myths: her sharp, passionate intelligence.

Mom and I had a new bond. As the peace movement grew, we went together to antiwar marches. We boarded buses to Washington, D.C.; Newark, New Jersey; and New York City. We carried signs and screamed slogans with the other marchers. The antiwar movement and the growing social unrest gave us a focus for our discontent, and a place to feel some commonality with others after so much stigma and isolation.

SOMERVILLE HIGH WAS a shock. The three-story, L-shaped brick building had a huge smokestack at its center that made it look like a factory. The grounds were asphalt, with not a blade of grass. But bleaker than the physical setting was the dullness of the classes and the loss of my friends. During seventh and eighth grades, I had been with the same classmates in the top track, in the electric air of teachers who challenged us, and we had bonded as a group. Now, I was in an English class where some kids could barely read. My body sagged in the thick, dull air of the classroom, and sometimes, no matter how hard I fought sleepiness, my eyelids would grow heavy and my head would bob down and then jerk up with a start.

Most of my classmates had stayed on for ninth grade at our old school; only the few of us from Millstone township had to go as freshmen to Somerville High. The worst was that I had lost Theresa. Her family had moved away over the summer, but our friendship had ended before that. Toward the end of eighth grade, Theresa had stopped sitting next to me at lunch and passing me notes in class.
She stopped asking me over. She acted like she didn't know me at all—no longer catching my eye, raising her eyebrows, and grinning that conspiratorial buddy grin. I was completely baffled, and devastated. What had I done? I wondered if it was because I had decided I was against the Vietnam War. Or perhaps I had done something to offend her, or now that she knew me better, she didn't like me. Or maybe it was about my mother. The loss left me hurt and aching, and I stayed away from her. I never asked her what had happened. Shame held me back.

 

 

THERE WAS ONE ELECTIVE I chose that was actually interesting. It was Ancient Civilizations, my only class that had upper classmen, which made it exciting and intimidating. In the chapter on the Fertile Crescent and the ancient Middle East, there was a profile of a nose with a huge hump labeled “Semitic Nose.” No one else seemed to notice; I was the only Jew in class, one of the few in Somerville High. I went home and stared at myself in the mirror, turning my head sideways. My nose didn't have a hump, but it was not petite or pert. I stared harder, cringing at how huge it was. I took my index finger to my nose, pressing it against the tip, trying to imagine my nose made smaller, less enormous, more pretty.

One day in class when we were studying the Roman Empire, an Italian exchange student came to speak to us about his country. At the end of his talk, he said, “I have a question for the class. How many of you are against the war in Vietnam?” My arm shot up. I looked around and noticed my classmates staring at me. I was the only one with my hand up. There it hung in the cold air. How I hated standing out as different. Blushing, I held my arm up a fraction longer, and then slowly lowered it.

Each day after school I came home to an empty house, since Mom was off at her graduate classes. The first thing I did was go into the kitchen, where I would open the stainless steel freezer, grab the carton of ice cream, and plop it on the kitchen counter. Then I would get a soup spoon from the utensil drawer. I would stand over the carton, eating one spoonful of ice cream after another. There was a great, unfillable void in my belly. At a certain point, I would tell myself,
Okay, this is the last spoonful.
And then I would take another. I couldn't stop.

In my freshman year, I gained thirty pounds.

 

 

THE SUMMER BETWEEN ninth and tenth grade, I spent the entire two-month season at Camp Birch Ridge. Money was tight since my parents' divorce, which had just been finalized, so I was paying for half the camp tuition by working as kitchen help. Each day after lunch, the camp codirector, Skipper with her short brown hair, wearing men's pants and work boots, stood at the head of the dining hall and sang out campers' names for mail call. This day had been a bonanza for me: one letter from Mom, and one from Dad. I folded both envelopes and shoved them in the back pocket of my shorts, because it was my turn to scrape, wash, and dry all the lunch dishes.

The problem for me in the kitchen was that I was slow and distractible. Left on my own with my rubber-gloved hands in the steamy, soapy water of the double metal sink, I would easily slip into reverie, my sponge moving more and more slowly over the white plates. I never finished before the end of the after-lunch rest period. Today, right after lunch, my unit was going on a hayride. When the camp bell rang, signaling the period change, I rushed to finish up, ripped off my gloves and hung up the dish towel, and raced outside.

In the camp meadow, Skipper was already sitting on the tractor hitched to a wagon filled with hay, and my unit, the Beavers, were all aboard the wagon. “Hurry up!” Skipper yelled toward me as I crossed the meadow. I broke from a trot into a run and leapt into the hay. We lurched forward, across the meadow and into a dirt track through the woods. Someone suggested singing “Kookaburra,” and everyone launched in but me.