The Medicine Burns (2 page)

I guess I thought, if they're not going to be the spectacle, I'll just have to do that, too. I started to grab everything I'd stolen and brought to Phil. I pulled out the stereo and gathered up the bedside lamp, blankets, and chairs. And when it dawned on me that I could never carry it out of there, I left it all in the corner of the room like a surrogate me, an imposing totem of my generosity and their indebtedness.

When I lost my patience with Phil, I lost it for my parents and home life as well. It wasn't innocence, but some kind of faith that I'd lost. I let my parents know I was miserable, but I kept my reasons from them. I told my friends the whole story, except the parts about my stealing all that stuff. I guess I didn't trust them with that blackmail material. No doubt, my mother would have trusted any source who claimed to know the truth about her fine china, missing then for at least a week.

My mother proffered comfort with one of her own stories, and I believe it was told with a number of intents, some of which she was unaware of. In retrospect, it seems her sharing this story was the way she tried to induce me to share mine. But I think she was skeptical that it would work, and so her story, by the end of her telling it, became something of a parable on the self-indulgence of suffering.

She began by claiming that she never felt pretty or desired by anyone. She was fifteen, and the cast on her leg had become more of a cage in which she lived.

It was her older sister, Evie, who first began to adorn herself with makeup and jewelry, and whose figure could make the plain dresses she wore receive undue attention. They were living in New York during World War II, and though men in uniform were a common sight, my mother thought of them all as young heroes, and she described a line of white-suited sailors with their perfect black shoes standing along the piers like a contingent of angels. She and Evie walked past them with a bag of groceries they were bringing home; the men circled around Evie and took the bag from her hands, and with her burden lifted, they coaxed her down to the beach.

Three of the sailors, the most handsome of them, wanted to walk with Evie along the shore. My mother, with her iron cast, could barely manage to walk across the sand. Evie asked her to stand by the rocks. The sailor with the grocery bag placed it down beside her and told my mother to keep her eye on it, then winked at her before he ran off to join the others at the surf.

She watched them disappear under the piers, and it was a long while before they returned. I can't imagine what she thought about while they were gone, perhaps that they had taken her sister to heaven. But when they returned, more than an hour later, she was still standing where they'd left her. There was sand on the mens' uniforms and in her sister's hair. After trudging up the beach, one sailor had his arm around Evie's shoulder, his fingers dangerously close to her breast.

Before the sailor gathered up the sack of groceries to carry back to the house, he made an attempt to lift my mother up and spin her around. But while my mother had stood in the sun, the cast had grown searing hot, and when the sailor touched it, it scalded his hand. The others laughed as he clutched his hand between his legs, cursing and whining.

That same year, Evie got pregnant and disclosed to my mother that she wasn't sure who the father was. If it was the man she suspected it was, he was probably at sea. They went to my grandmother who found someone to perform the abortion. Evie hemorrhaged. She eventually healed, but could not have children.

My mother's embarrassment and suffering was temporary, like a hand withdrawn from a flame. But Evie's misery was like a cast for life, and made my mother's cast seem a small inconvenience. In fact, my mother claimed her cast had protected her from devils disguised as angels.

I don't claim to have told the story the way she did. She was much more frugal with words. But I've told it the way I remembered it. I remember it as a story she benefited from by telling, and that is what makes me doubt she ever told it truthfully.

At the time, I certainly doubted that all misfortune has its benefits. I didn't think that my friend, Raul, might also be betrayed by my lover, and that would somehow compensate for my humiliation. I doubted, also, that every story deserves another story. My mother sat back with her arms folded across her stomach and waited. When she discovered my story was not forthcoming, she finally asked me why I had become so morbid. That was the term she used, not
depressed
, which was a word she would not fathom. That was a word for shrinks and people who depended on them.

I don't think it was in the spirit of rebellion that I concealed it from her. I believed then, as I do now, that some stories are our own, and that by telling them too soon, we limit their effect on us. I admit, I wanted to experience the full, protracted suffering I associated with the loss of a lover. I was also sure that my mother was not interested in understanding, but in remedying my problem. We sat at a deadlock; she urging my divulgence, me denying her, until she became exasperated and went in to bed.

My mother once said, “A mother knows everything.” She meant for me to understand that as her responsibility. I'll tell you how I luridly imagined what happened as a result of this precept: frustrated by my silence, she must have lain awake long after my father had fallen asleep, and some inkling of intuition or suspicion led her to believe that I possessed something that would answer her questions.

She waited until I left the house before she began a thorough cleaning of my room. She found what she was looking for in my dresser, but she must have turned over several pungent jockstraps, none of which were mine. (At the time I had weekend employment at a Jewish country club where I was as able a locker-room attendant as my mother was a housecleaner.) I'm still disturbed today by her oversight. Had she recognized the use I made of those jocks, she might have been embarrassed from further inquiry. But rummaging further, she found the letter, and it was the letter that enabled her to launch her inquisition without having to imagine a thing.

She was setting the table for a game of mahjong. Her friends would be arriving in a couple of hours. She was filling ceramic bowls with candy and nuts. When I arrived home, she looked up as though she was startled. Perhaps she was; I'm sure she could not help but to have seen me differently.

But I saw something had changed in her, too. It was a look of shame that had irrepressibly risen to her surface. It was the shame she had denied by her storytelling.

“Do you want to tell me something?” she asked finally.

She came around the table and squeezed my arm. “You don't need to tell me. I'm already well aware,” she said, and pulled the letter from an apron pocket.

I could easily re-create the argument that ensued, with both of us playing defensively, because arguments around the issue of privacy have never ceased for me, nor have the strategies changed. What I found most compelling was my mother's insistence that one must “fit in,” that if I chose the life of a homosexual, I would be ostracized, singled out, kept apart.

And I imagined myself sitting alone on a beach somewhere, sharing my mother's unvoiced humiliation while a muscle-bound cartoon kicked sand in my face. I said to her, “Perhaps I will have to learn about devils disguised as angels.”

Curfews were instituted in the belief that homosexuality existed only when practiced. These were desperate measures that I couldn't be bound by, and I remember pulling up in a car full of friends as the sun rose. My mother would be preparing my breakfast and about to wake me when I would come in the front door, just ready to fall asleep. There were the tedious arguments that never broadened our understanding of each other. And then grudging silences.

You may wonder what my father's reaction was to all this. His was an imposing presence wearing massive suits from Big and Tall shops, but beneath the mafia looks and dark glasses, he was really terrified by conflict. He wept when my mother showed him the letter, but refused her suggestion that he have a little talk with me. He was a traveling salesman and I never saw much of him but one day the phone rang. “How are you, Dad?” I asked. His voice was shaky and finally broke on the other end. He asked to speak to my mother. I remember sitting in the kitchen while she spoke to him on the phone.

“You did what?” I heard her asking. “What are we going to do now?” And finally I heard her say, “Then make an appointment with a psychiatrist and explain to your boss that you can still work while you see him.”

“Your father's had a nervous breakdown,” she said. “He walked out of a store with the equipment he'd just sold them. They found him placing the cameras in his trunk.”

His boss had already suspended him from further work until he was fully evaluated by a psychiatrist. I think we all sensed that there was no specific amount of time implied by this. My father never did resume work for that company.

Not that he didn't conform to the wishes of his boss—he did seek out the counsel of a psychiatrist, and after each session defended himself against my mother's ire. For her, the whole thing was an embarrassment; I believe she felt that there was an analogy between a twisted mind and a twisted limb, and that a therapy should be first and foremost corrective.

“And what did you discover today?” she would ask him. “How much longer?”

And despite the fact that my father grew sullen and timid in response to these questions, his withdrawal and vagueness only assured her that his sessions were not working. It was only a month before she demanded his return to work. I heard them talking about it late one night after I had arrived home, silently unlocking the door, taking off my shoes, and drifting past their bedroom. I heard him sobbing, and stopped to listen.

“What can I say to Epstein?” I heard him ask. “I have nothing conclusive to bring him.”

“Use that,” she said. “Tell him the therapy isn't working
. Explain to him what was on your mind when you did it, not in detail, but tell him that your son is having problems and that you collapsed under the stress.”

Their voices lowered and I could no longer hear them, even with my ear pressed to the door, but my mind was full of talk, and I urged myself to believe that I wasn't at the root of my father's collapse. For the first time I began to pity my father, fearing that he would lose the one opportunity he had to understand the real source of his anxiety. But I could not trust my pity, fearing that my mother may have clarified his problem in the defining terms that are characteristic of her stories.

I slept fretfully and was up when they awoke the next morning. My mother laid out the clothes my father was to wear to his interview. He smiled at me pitifully from their bedroom doorway, then closed the door before he began putting on the prescribed suit. My mother was busy cutting grapefruits in the kitchen, and sprinkling sugar on each half.

I sat with them at the breakfast table. My mother tucked a bib over my father's shirt and tie. She complimented his barber who had trimmed his hair just a few days before. After he had eaten his grapefruit and stood away from the table, she came up close to him and straightened his tie and held out the jacket for him to slip on. I hadn't seen that doting tenderness in years, and I felt strangely moved and terrified at the same time.

She came back to the table to clear away our dishes and her mood had already darkened. I waited to see if she would mention the interview, but she did not. Instead, she began talking about the neighbors whose homes she'd watch through the mirrored window in the living room. I already recognized that her stories about the neighbors were her roundabout way of confronting me. She asked me about the good-for-nothing son of Airs. Rosen-bloom, who was growing pot plants along the side of their house. She'd watch his comings and goings with keen interest.

Finally she said, “The days of entertaining our neighbors are long gone. Every time Ruth speaks to me she wants to know about your father and you; she acts as though we're some kind of TV show—there for her entertainment.”

For as long as I could remember, Ruth Rosenbloom had been the bane of my mother's existence. She'd once told me about the horrible affront Ruth had committed on the day of my bris. At the time, my parents had been friendly with the neighbors. They had just moved into their home. There are photographs of my parents entertaining the neighbors on the lawn, all of them with drinks in their hands and a grill smoking in the background. The neighbors had returned these gestures by helping with house repairs, and throughout my mother's pregnancy, they had urged her to take a less active role in the construction of a fence around their property. It was only in the middle of her eighth month that my mother could be convinced to put down her hammer and take on the role of supervisor. She remains proud of the fact that she saw the fence completed in her first two hours of labor pains; it was only then that she allowed my father to rush her to the hospital, with the neighbors in a caravan behind.

She claims that I was born without hesitancy, which surprises me even to this day. But then, my birth has been so mythologized by her, it seems more likely that this “anxiousness to enter the world” was merely a response to my early complaints at having been born at all. She has admitted, however, that I was an ugly baby, and that it was with horror that she recognized my turned feet.

The neighbors gathered outside the glass window to watch me, while my mother wept to my father that she was responsible for my deformity.

She remained inconsolable until my father sought a doctor's intervention. He assured her of the commonness of my condition, and that modern medicine had led us away from the primitive measures she had endured as a child, and though he doubted I would dance, he consoled her that my childhood would be normal and happy. His authority soothed her, and she was soon able to accept the congratulations from the neighbors who filed in around her bedside.