Bebe Moore Campbell (5 page)

I sat there in his office, trying to connect all the dots, to look for signs I’d missed. My mind grew clogged, and there were blanks in my memory. When did she catch this brain flu? Was it in tenth grade, when her best friend moved away? Was it in eleventh grade, when her sweetie broke her heart? Earlier, when we uprooted her from Atlanta? When Clyde left? What was the trauma? Had someone’s hands touched her in the wrong place? Was I too critical, too perfectionist, too busy selling to pay enough attention?

I began to cry, and Dr. Ustinov handed me a tissue. “Listen, Mother, don’t blame yourself.”

Ha! Isn’t it always Mommy’s fault? Mom didn’t do this, she didn’t do that. She nursed too long; she bottle-fed. She slapped the shit out of the kid; she raised a spoiled brat. She was too dumb and lazy to get a job; she worked full-time and never paid attention. She weighed 300 pounds and waddled into school for open house; she weighed 110 and showed too much cleavage. She got high; she was too uptight. She traded Dad in for a lesbian lover; she did everything her man told her to do. She stayed with a husband who beat her and set a poor example; she left the fool and broke up the family or, worse yet, she kicked his ass and started running things. She let her boyfriends spend the night; she didn’t provide a male role model. She never cleaned; she screamed when the little ones tracked in mud. Lazy cow fed the kids McDonald’s every night. Negligent slob didn’t attend the PTA. Too trifling to help sell Girl Scout cookies. She let her children run wild and had herself a good ol’ time. Her child was drowning, and she didn’t save her.

“It’s not about reasons anymore. It’s about medication. Your daughter can have a good life, even with this,” the doctor said.

He prescribed a mood stabilizer and an antipsychotic. Miracle drugs, he proclaimed. When I asked if there was an alternative to the medication, he shrugged and said, “Mania.” When I asked, foolishly, desperately, if Trina could still go away to college, I could see the pity swimming in his eyes as he stared at me. So I called the university and asked for delayed admission, which it granted.

Trina took the pills while she was in the hospital. She slept around the clock and gained ten pounds in one week. When Clyde saw her, he told me, in front of Trina, that she didn’t need to take any pills. She just needed to stop smoking weed. Once she got out, she took the tablets sporadically and then not at all. Late in October, she wound up back in the hospital a third time.

For that last episode I had to call the police again, and I didn’t call Clyde. When the dispatcher asked me if she was a danger to herself or others, I screamed, “Yes!” I could hear the sound of glass breaking as I spoke. At that precise moment, Trina was playing demolition derby throughout the house. With a hammer in her hand, she was going after windows. She’d already shattered all the glass in my car and dented the hood and the top. I was cowering in my bedroom, behind a locked door, listening:
crash! boom! bang!
Like in the cartoons, only not funny.

“Fifty-one fifty,” the dispatcher said.

“What?” I asked.

“Ma’am, I’m talking to our officers. We’ll have a car there in a few minutes. Is she armed?”

Hard question. Not so much answering it but dealing with the implications: a black girl going crazy with a hammer in front of cops. Eula Love, I thought, conjuring up an image of the mentally ill black woman shot dead by the LAPD as she brandished a knife in her front yard. “No. No.
No!
She isn’t armed. She doesn’t have a weapon. She is a minor. Please, don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt her.”

Trina put down the hammer as soon as the officers came. They were gentle with her. Two big officers who never touched their guns. The Latino one sat her down on the living room sofa. From time to time he patted her arm.

“Trina, dear, you’ve wrecked your mom’s house. Something’s going wrong in your mind. We’re going to take you to the hospital so you can get some help. You’ll be on a seventy-two-hour hold. You won’t be able to leave. After the three days, there will be a hearing to decide if they need to keep you longer. All right? We want your cooperation, dear. All right?”

“She’s not really my mother. She killed my real mother and stole me from her when I was a baby. We don’t even look alike.”

Officer Martinez had heard it all before; he silenced my protestations by arching his brow.

“Hon, after you get back from the hospital, you and your mom will have to talk. Maybe you both can get some counseling. But right now, we’d like you to come with us.”

“She has bipolar disorder,” I said after Trina was sitting in the car and I was standing on the sidewalk, looking at the back of my child’s head, watching it bob up and down with each sob. Officer Martinez was next to me. “She refuses to take the medicine.”

He gave me a sympathetic look. “Yeah, that’s usual. It takes them a while before they accept the fact that they’re sick.”

“I don’t know if I can last much longer.”

Martinez smiled. “Sure you can. You’re a strong woman.”

Strong enough to plant a crop, pick cotton, birth a baby in the field,
and keep on working.

The police took Trina to a county facility, Daniel Freeman Hospital in the Marina, which was owned and run by the Catholic Church. The vibe there was less formal than at Beth Israel, a little warmer, perhaps. Maybe it was the Virgin Mary; her replicas were everywhere. I’d be coming around the corner on my way to Trina’s ward, and
bam!
there would be Mary, her arms outstretched, the sculpted billows of her garments frozen, that “everything’s going to be all right” gleam in her eye. I didn’t necessarily believe in her intercessory powers, but I found her presence comforting.

There were all kinds of people there, from the homeless to celebrities. One actor, as famous for his addiction as he was for his movies, sat next to Trina at smoke break. He looked so frail in real life, a small, dark, handsome white man. And so polite. When the gray-haired Latina nurse called his name, he said, “Ma’am?” automatically, just like the well-brought-up southern boy his mama had raised.

The window repair ended up taking ten days. My housekeeper didn’t say anything, but she knew what was going on. My nosy gardener asked if somebody held a grudge against me, if I’d had a fight with my boyfriend. This man who mowed my lawn was hungry for gory details.

I avoided my neighbors, rushing in and out of my house. At the grocery store I ran into the woman who lived directly across from me. We barely said hello, but when she saw me, two or three days after Trina broke my windows, she stopped her cart in the middle of the cereal aisle, walked over to me, put her arms around my shoulders, and held me, which told me two things I didn’t want to know. Number one: people were talking; number two: I had become someone to be pitied.

Motherless child; childless mother. God was doing his stand-up routine again.

When the glass man finally showed up, he let out a long whistle as he surveyed the damage.

“Don’t ask,” I said.

“No, ma’am, I never do.”

His price was reasonable. I was grateful for that too.

I VISITED TRINA EVERY NIGHT AT SEVEN WHILE SHE WAS AT Daniel Freeman. On my first visit, she stumbled out of her room like a zombie with broken toes. I called the nurse.

“Oh, a little too much Haldol,” she said. “It’ll wear off.” The woman disappeared before I could reply.

The next night Trina was better, just depressed. She cried and apologized. “You’re the best mom,” she told me.

“I don’t want to be crazy anymore,” she said when the hospital released her to me. “I’m tired of it. I’ll take the medicine. I won’t smoke dope or drink. They said there’s a program at the Weitz Center. I’ll go there.”

Frances and Adriana had come with me the night I brought Trina home. Frances drove. “Some things people ain’t supposed to go through alone” was how she put it as the light from the streetlamps glinted off the scar on her face.

“Trina,” she said when we were all seated in the car and she was driving off, “you have to work at staying well like it’s a nine-to-five job, girly. Your mother can only do so much. You can spend your life going in and out of hospitals, or you can do the things you need to do to take care of yourself. Do you hear me?”

“I said I’d go to the partial program,” Trina said, her tone surly.

“Listen, don’t get no attitude. You can go to as many programs as you like,” Frances said, “but if you’re not committed to doing the work, trust me, it’s just a waste of time. Put your heart in it.”

Trina didn’t answer for a few minutes. “I’m going to do the work,” she said.

“It’s hard,” Adriana said.

A REPRIEVE. MASSA HAD CHANGED HIS MIND, BROUGHT BACK the slave child, and placed her in her mother’s arms along with manumission papers for both.

“It’s not going to be that easy,” Frances told me a few days later, when I was rhapsodizing about Trina’s progress, the resumption of her old life,
our
old life. But I dismissed her caution. I had set my sights on the promised land, and that was the only place I wanted to live.

AS GOOD AS NEW WAS QUIET THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, as it was on most weekdays. I worked in the office and caught up with paperwork. When I came out around lunchtime, I heard Frances laughing. I smelled the French fries before I saw him. We just stood there staring, neither one of us wanting to cross the threshold. Finally, Frances said, “Keri, look who’s here,” as though my ex-boyfriend’s coming to my store were some kind of good news.

I didn’t say anything. “Come on over here, baby,” he said, holding a bag of fries. “Meet me halfway.” Frances disappeared. I stayed right where I was standing.

“Oh, so it’s like that,” he said, and in five steps he was right next to me. He waved the bag in front of my nose. Fries were his addiction, and he was always trying to corrupt me.

“From Chuck E. Cheese,” he said, grinning.

I took a handful and stuffed them in my mouth. Chuck E. Cheese fries were the gold standard as far as fast food was concerned.

“Three preschoolers tried to jack me for these, but I fought them off just so I could bring you some, baby. I was like, ‘Take that,’ ” he said, miming karate chops that were so comical we both had to laugh.

“Orlando, what are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.” His eyes had locked into mine. He had nice eyes, large and deep-set. His lips were almost the same color as the rest of his face. I was having a hard time taking my eyes off his lips.

“This is my place of business.”

“Look, Keri. Can we have lunch or something? I want to talk to you. I miss you.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about. Let’s not keep going in circles. “

”You know I liven things up for you, baby. I already made you smile.”

Making me smile had never been Orlando’s problem. When we met eight years ago, our relationship was a laugh a minute. Orlando had been starring in a popular sitcom for nearly four years. He was a sought-after actor in his late thirties. Movie offers were coming in. He was nominated for an Emmy. At the ceremony, we sat right next to the entire cast of
Cheers.
His world was glitzy and glamorous, but I knew where I fit in. From the time we met at a late-night restaurant, both of us waiting for a table, I realized what he saw in me, what he wanted from me. I was a woman who didn’t glitter for the world, just for him, a woman who could make it through the hard times.

He wanted to marry me. If he’d asked me once, he’d asked me too many damn times. I’d always turned him down. Not because I didn’t love him but because I believed that Trina should be out of the house before I took a husband. And there was the matter of Orlando’s career and his finances.

Orlando didn’t win the Emmy, and the following year his show ended. He kept expecting to land another starring role, but he began to do guest spots. The movie offers dried up. He did a few commercials and a lot of theater. He still worked, but the projects had dwindled and his earnings were nowhere near what they had been. He wasn’t broke, but his budget was tight.

“You have a degree,” I reminded him one night, after six months had passed without one single job. We’d been together for three years, and I was alarmed by Orlando’s denial, his lack of productivity. He dreamed Willy Loman dreams. His next big role was always around the corner.

“I know I have a degree,” he said, his eyes going a little cold.

“You could get a job. You could teach acting. That would allow you some time for auditions.”

He took that the wrong way. Turned it into my not believing in him. It became a theme, my not believing in him. That was the night I realized it wasn’t the money, it was Orlando’s desperation, so quiet and so deep, that I couldn’t abide. No, I’d told him that night, I just don’t believe in
us.

“I’m not going to lunch with you, Orlando.”

“Are you okay? Everything all right with Trina?”

“Trina’s fine, and so am I. How are the boys? I saw PJ riding in a car on Crenshaw a couple of weeks ago.” Just saying PJ’s name made me smile.

“Yeah, he was probably on his way to get his tattoo.”

“What kind of tattoo?”

“The wrong kind. Lucy called me and said he had the words FUCK YOU tattooed on his lower back.”

“Oh, my God. So I take it Lucy’s on the warpath.”

“You got that right,” Orlando said.

Orlando’s ex-wife was not an overly patient woman, nor did she subscribe to modern child-rearing practices. When her sons were younger she didn’t spare the rod. A tiny woman, she nevertheless packed quite a wallop. I’d been a victim of her wrath one night when she had followed Orlando and me to a bar. In the ensuing argument she stuck to her theme, which was that if Orlando could afford to buy me a drink, he could pay his child support on time. Before I had time to express sisterly solidarity, I was the recipient of a great deal of the drink that she tossed in Orlando’s face. She later apologized, but I’d always questioned her sincerity.

“On the other hand, Jabari is rolling. Every college in the nation wants a piece of him.” Orlando’s older son was gifted both academically and athletically.