The Long Journey Home (21 page)

For months I’d been dealing with John’s anger in the Town House Motor Lodge. And living with Mother over the previous several
weeks had become increasingly stressful as well. Memories of my last night in my apartment before being committed to Northampton State Hospital are still cuttingly clear.

I came home in the late afternoon to find Mercer—who’d lived with Mother in Cairo since experiencing a psychotic episode while stationed off the Vietnam coast—sitting in my living room. He’d stopped taking his antipsychotic medication and had driven up from Georgia. Being separated from Mother for so long had become unbearable to him. I also came home to Mother’s firm announcement that I had to stay in that evening, that I’d been going at too rapid a pace for my own good.

Never in my adult life had she overtly ordered me to do anything. Her control had been subtle, and was internalized when I was very young. Without having realized it, I’d lived much of my life to please her. I didn’t know what living my own life would mean. But at that overt command, something inside me snapped.

I picked out a change of clothes and brought them to the bathroom, announcing that I was going to take a bath in case I decided to go out later. Then I locked the door and ran the water into the tub. After my bath I went to the kitchen to fix something to eat. But Mother said that she had cooked supper, and would I please just sit and eat. I sat down and she set a plate in front of me. I looked down at the mountain of scrambled eggs before me and felt like gagging.

Then Mother handed me a tall glass of milk.

It was a handblown glass from Mexico, filled with tiny air bubbles. Because those glasses broke so easily, the one that Mother handed me was one of the few that remained. Whether it was the pressure of Mother’s hand around the glass or mine, I don’t know. Perhaps it was something else that caused the glass to break. But just as I took it from her, the bottom of it fell out in a perfect circle, shattering on the floor in the pool of spilt milk.

“I’ll clean it up,” Mother said, rushing to get a handful of paper towels. For a second I saw her frailty and insecurity and felt pity for her. Then I felt anger and helplessness. Then anger again. “No,” I
said, tearing paper towels from the dispenser. “No, I’ll clean it up myself.”

I knelt on the kitchen floor and wiped up the milk and the glass fragments.

I was utterly exhausted. I was tired of Mother making my bed each morning after I left for school. I was tired of feeling guilty for not making the bed myself, and resentful because I didn’t want to be pressured into making it when a made bed was the least of my priorities. I was tired of her snapping off the lights after me everywhere I went. I was tired of her doing things for me constantly when I wanted to just be left alone. I was tired of feeling her enormous need, tired of feeling sorry for her.

I was tired of always feeling inadequate.

The longer she stayed, the more the apartment felt like it was Mother’s rather than mine. I was tired of having to leave early in the morning so I could sit in a coffee shop at the university and have half an hour alone before beginning classes.

I cleaned up the milk and glass. Mother and I ate silently. I kept thinking of how frantic she’d looked when the glass broke, and I felt guilty as I was filling myself with the eggs I didn’t want. Forkful after forkful of eggs, just as I’d eaten to please Mother when I was a child.

After supper I got up. “I’m going to take a nap now,” I said, walking to my bedroom.

Mother pushed herself hurriedly back from the table and got up. “I want to take the phone from your room. I don’t want you to be woken by a phone call.”

“I need the phone,” I responded stubbornly. “I’m expecting a call.” Then I closed my door and locked it.

Mother beat on the door for a while, demanding to be let in. Then she stopped. I lay on my bed, smoking a cigarette, too upset to sleep.

In a little while Paula called, as I’d expected her to. Talking, I felt a rush of grief. Over the summer she’d grown closer to Mother as she’d grown more distant from me. And she’d recently said to me: “I
don’t know how to relate to you anymore. You’ve become like a therapist to me and I don’t know what to do.”

I crushed my empty cigarette pack and put it in the ashtray by my bed, got up, and unlocked the door. I handed Mother the phone, saying that it was Paula and that I was going out for cigarettes. Then I rushed out before she could stop me.

I walked the couple of blocks to the Pizza Tower restaurant across Pleasant Street. I had exactly enough money for a pack of cigarettes and a Diet Coke, which I sat in the restaurant drinking while I smoked.

Before I’d finished my Diet Coke, Mercer came to my table and sat down.

“Please come home, Sister,” he said in his thick Southern drawl. “Mama wants you to come home.”

“I can’t. Don’t you remember the things you wrote me when you were having your breakdown, Mercer? Don’t you remember how she hurt you?”

He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. “I was crazy then, Sister. Mama didn’t mean any harm. She didn’t know any better. Please come home.” He took a long drag from his cigarette, then exhaled. A cloud of smoke swirled between us.

“I can’t, Mercer.”

He got up then, turned, and walked away, his shoulders rounded in a permanent slump of defeat, smoke trailing around and behind him.

What could I do?

“I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from
Jesus Christ Superstar
wailed from the jukebox.

Where could I go?

In a few minutes Mother came into the restaurant, walked back to my table, and stood looking down at me. She spoke in a firm, authoritative voice: “Come home, Margaret.”

“I can’t.”

Her body trembled with rage, and her neck, engorged with blood, looked as if it had swollen to twice its normal size. But her voice was
still controlled, measured, and deathly calm. In the dimly lit restaurant, I looked up at her.

“Come home and take care of your son.”

I’d never heard her voice sound so cold.

Now “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” blasted from the jukebox.

There was no way I could care for my son. I thought of Dee and Tom, and how many times the boys had played together while Dee and I visited with each other.

“Mother,” I said, “please just call Dee to take Chris. She’ll do that for me.”

My voice was as controlled as Mother’s. Anger was battling with guilt. But I couldn’t go home.

Without saying another word, Mother turned away from me and left the restaurant.

I’d spent my last dollar on cigarettes. I was too upset to go to friends who lived in town. And I couldn’t go home. Would Mother send someone to look for me? Yes, she probably would. I had to get away from her. I needed to be alone. I needed to slow my racing thoughts. I desperately needed to rest.

Where could I go?

I left the restaurant and walked down Pleasant Street toward the university.
Where can I go? Where can I go?
The question repeated itself in my mind faster and faster, and I walked faster and faster as if to keep up with my thoughts. Suddenly I tripped on a sandal and nearly fell. It was then that I realized that I’d rubbed blisters on the soles of both feet. Stopping, I leaned against the side of a tree and unbuckled and removed the new, handcrafted sandals that Mother had bought for me, much too expensive for her poor budget, and much too large for me.

Too large. Of course they were too large. Then they weren’t sandals at all; they were a metaphor for my whole life and what Mother expected of me. Of course the sandals were too goddamn large! I flung one out into the darkness. “Damn you!” I flung the other in the opposite direction. “Damn you!” Two beautifully crafted sandals forever separated. “Damn you!” I cried out into the darkness.

Then I turned and walked back toward town.

After a while, I reached the gate to West Cemetery. I knew I would be safe from Mother in the cemetery at night. The night was starless and dark. I heard the low, long growl of a dog. Then the dog itself appeared, walking cautiously among the tombstones toward me. It was a large German shepherd. He paused and stood observing me.
Walk calmly on up the hill
, I told myself.
Don’t give it any indication of fear
. Then I thought of Saint Francis and his ability to communicate with animals, his kindness and compassion. His image had come to me so vividly when I was pregnant with Chris that I did an oil painting of him to celebrate the life of my unborn child. Now I imagined Saint Francis walking quietly beside me as I continued on up the hill.

Soon the dog turned and walked away.

I knew exactly where Emily Dickinson’s family plot lay enclosed by an old black iron fence. I couldn’t say now what thoughts were racing through my mind as I walked through West Cemetery that July night. As an adult I’d read little poetry. But as a girl, I’d read poetry almost daily and had especially loved the work of Emily Dickinson. After moving to our house in the Shutesbury woods, I bought a record of her poetry being read aloud. As I cleaned hand and paw prints off the sliding glass doors that enclosed the living/dining room on three sides, or—with an extension brush—raked cobwebs off the wood beam that ran along the apex of the cathedral ceiling, I listened to her words.

The more despair I felt in my daily life and marriage, the more I turned to Dickinson’s poetry as comfort and companion.

The Dickinson plot lay straight ahead. I opened the gate and went inside. To my right two tall cedars twisted their way toward the stars like the cedars in Van Gogh’s paintings. To my left stood the Dickinson family tombstones. I walked past the stones of Emily Dickinson’s grandparents and parents. I walked past the stone of her sister, Lavinia.

At Emily’s grave, I sat down. I could not hear one sound, only Emily’s words in my heart—

I stroked the grass growing over her grave—

A slight breeze rattled nearby branches.

In the deep silence there, I lay down and sobbed into the grass and dry earth.

After a while, I got up and left the Dickinson plot, closing the gate behind me. I walked down the little dirt road to the other graveyard entrance, this one with a chain hung between the gateposts to keep cars out. The road went past the older, hilly section of the cemetery, with sandstone and slate tombstones planted centuries before: Mrs. Sarah, the wife of Dr. Ebenezer Dickinson, 1743; M. Ephraim Kellogg, 1777; Nehemiah Strong, 1772; Mr. Solomon Boltwood, 1762. Stones leaning in the earth.

I climbed over the chain between the gateposts. To be certain that I didn’t run into Mother out looking for me, I walked behind the stores on Pleasant Street and across the parking lot of the Mobil station, built where the house in which Emily Dickinson and her family lived from 1840 to 1855 once stood.

Before I had time to decide where to go, I saw Dr. Turcotte’s wife, Claire, parked in front of the gas station. It was as if she’d known exactly where I’d been and was waiting there for me all along.

Jim Clark, who worked for Dr. Turcotte, sat in the front seat beside her. Jim had been Dr. Turcotte’s patient in the Brattleboro Retreat, a Vermont psychiatric hospital at which Dr. Turcotte had worked briefly before being fired. Now Jim lived in Dr. Turcotte’s house, and as a job, he listened to patients talk out their anxiety, stayed with patients who were not disturbed enough to be committed to a hospital but were still in crisis, and ran errands. Seeing me walking barefoot across the Mobil station parking lot, he opened the door, got out of the car, and headed toward me.

“Hi, Margaret,” he said. His dark eyes were sensitive and searching.

“Hello, Jim.”

“Come for a ride with us,” he said, gesturing toward the open door.

“I’m not going home, Jim,” I said. “I can’t.”

“No one’s going to make you do that. We’ll only go for a ride. It’s
just not safe for you to be out alone this late at night. We won’t take you anyplace you don’t want to go. I promise.”

I believed him. For the previous two months I’d spent hours talking to him in a small room off Dr. Turcotte’s main office. We’d both talked about our lives. He told me about beatings from his father, and how his mother had held his head under the running water in the kitchen sink while whipping his head and face with an old enema hose. I told him about John’s drinking, violence, and threats. I told him about my depression. Jim was a good listener, attentive and compassionate. I’d grown to trust him.

I got into the car beside Claire. She turned it around in the Pizza Tower parking lot and drove through Amherst. Then she turned right on Route 9 and headed for Northampton. I had no idea what to say to her. She was a warm, well-meaning woman who talked incessantly, words that I blocked out as I sat smoking, staring out the window, wondering what I was going to do now.

Where had the night gone? I must have walked around Amherst much longer than I’d thought. All the restaurants and coffee shops were closed, and Northampton looked deserted.