Crazy Enough (6 page)

The door opened to a long, straight hallway with patient rooms all along it. Immediately on the left was the small TV room. In the hallway were slumped a few catatonic bodies, someone in a broken wheelchair, someone leaning on the wall drawing with her finger, someone else stood swaying in the center of the hallway. I noticed her staring hard at us as we came in.

She was very thin, but looked like she had been pretty once, with high cheekbones and wide-set eyes. Her hair was a teased blonde-gray mass that would have pouffed around her head like a wiry cloud had she not woven it into two rough braids on either side of her head with childish bows at the end. “Helga the whore” said my brain. She stood in the hallway, staring slack-jawed until she saw my brother John, when she sprang to life hopping like a toddler into a room with a squeak.

“She has sex prawblums,” spat a fat, wall-eyed woman in front of the television.

“Hi, Mom!” I said, and went into the common room to give her a hug. Mom was wasted.

“Hi-, sh-shhweetie,” Mom groggily cooed back.

The TV room was small and stuffy. There were about five patients already in there watching
Donahue,
taking up all the seats, so we could only visit one at a time, while the rest stayed near the door or out in the hallway. I went first, while my brother Henry leaned on
the wall just inside the door awaiting his turn. Mom was rocking and wobbling in her chair so I held her hands and stood in front of her. “How are you?”

“Shooo-ooo mush better, babe.” She swayed my hands in hers as if in a dance. “Mu-uuush better. H-hooome soon,” she sang.

I wanted to leave so badly, run out of there. I loved my mom, but it was all so much. I knew she wasn't as crazy as all this. She didn't need to be here. She looked like a tiny, fucked-up, baby bunny, huddled in her chair, flanked by genuinely psychotic humans straight out of central casting. The wall-eyed schizo lady chimed in, chuckling in a slurred south Boston accent, “She's good naow, but you shoulda seent 'er when theyz brung 'er in heeyuh.”

With that my mom shook to her feet, swung her arm in slow motion to point at the lady. I saw bruises spreading out from under a wide bandage on her forearm.

“Don'tchoo talk to my children!!!” She was shaking and crying as the woman cackled and snorted, all satisfied with herself on the couch. It seemed like everyone started to wake up at that point, and make some kind of crazy noise in response to the weird confrontation unfolding during
Donahue
.

“Don'tchoo dare!!!” Mom wailed.

I looked back to the doorway at my brothers. Henry started toward me. I looked at John, I wanted him to come in and intervene, too, but he wasn't looking at me, or even aware of the medicated mayhem unfolding in the room. He was staring hard at something down the hall. He had both his hands on either side of the door, as if bracing himself. Henry and I do-si-do-ed in front of our weeping mom, so that I could get to the door and he could calm her down. He took her hands.

“Mom,” he started.

“She's soo
mean
!” she said.

“Sit down, Ma,” he said calmly as he got her to sit back down. Even at thirteen, Henry had a solid presence, normal and unflappable. He quieted Mom into her chair and everyone seemed to settle back into their haze-and-stare mode. Mom finally noticed my brother was holding her hands and lit up a little as he squatted in front of her, “How are you, Mom?”

“So-ooo mush better . . . home soon . . .”

John was still blocking the doorway, looking down the hall, his jaw set and his body stiff. I got to the door and tried to get on the other side of him but he wouldn't budge. Before he put his hand on my shoulder to turn me to face inside the TV room again, I got a good look at what he was watching.

Helga the whore had come back into the hallway with a slash of red lipstick on and was in a semisquat plié, knees cranked open to my brother, rubbing herself desperately with the bristles of a paddle hairbrush. John pushed me back in the room by my shoulder, and stood firm. I heard a nurse thump up the hallway to get Helga to stop. I heard little of the exchange other than Helga saying, “But he's so beautiful!” Then she sang like a child, “Gimme ten more minutes! Gimme ten more minutes!”

When the nurse got Helga handled, John finally let go of the door and came in. He gave Mom a quick, awkward hug and we were done.

We were silent all the way home.

The Seventies

I
looked just like my mom, everyone said so, but, in no time, I grew taller than her. Way taller, in fact. She was five foot two, and by my ninth birthday, I had at least three inches on her. My height, plus my big, smart-ass mouth, made people think I was much older. They also assumed I was tough. Mouthy and fisty, I had started a bit of a fighting habit that was giving me trouble in and out of school. I could shoot my mouth off and back it up with a swift kick in the nuts or a wildly swung roundhouse to the head. I told teachers to go to hell and meant it. I was starting to notice things sucking, and it was ticking me off.

The whole hospital thing was getting old. My mom had become the weakest girl that ever lived, in my opinion, and she seemed to relish the title. The world echoed with a chorus of “your poor mother,” and Mom would sing backup. She would cry and cry
and stare at us all, sucking all the hope and joy out of anything in a desperate, begging need to be the most hopeless of cases, and, “Isn't it so awful!”

I learned how to bite holes inside my mouth, say “I don't care,” and make no big deal about it when she would go lame. By all outward appearances, or as far as I would let any grown-up know, I was doing fine with everything, blissfully ignorant to what was going on with my mother, or stiff-upper-lipping it. I was neither. I was just big, loud, and broken. I had started to hear myself say things I didn't mean, but couldn't stop it. I would lie in bed and say, “Fuck you, God.” Slap my hands over my mouth only to hear it ringing in my head on a dirty loop.

God can hear your thoughts.

I didn't mean it, but it played over and over, hissing like a dusty hi-fi in my head.
It's not me, but what if God can't tell it isn't me? I don't really mean it!

He hates you, too.

God was going to see to it that I would live a miserable, lonely life for my terrible words to him. I was sure of it. It was like people spreading shitty gossip about you to a teacher or parent that wasn't true, but nobody believed the truth, because, well . . . it
is
you, and you are a bad person. Bad people think bad thoughts and bad things happen to those people.

Terrible voices were tiptoeing through my two lobes all the time. Many nights I would bite my lip and punch myself in the head to try to shut the voices up, but they would just laugh. I would also suffer paralyzing anxiety, knotted stomach cramps, and outbursts. I walked around, constantly feeling like an exposed tooth nerve, but I did everything I could to make the world at large think I was doing just fine. I was a big strong girl.

It wasn't just the punching myself to sleep and all the rest that let me know something was wrong with me. I was a weirdo, a total outcast. Every day at school was the worst day of my life. I didn't have a lot of friends, but I had invisible pets that I talked to in public. I was just as quick to be completely destroyed by an unkind word as I was to smash someone in the face for hurting someone else. Everything mattered more to me than everyone else. And no matter how hard I tried, I was always in trouble, because I could never be quiet or disappear. And the one person, in the whole world, who I knew loved me completely, the only one who told me I was beautiful and could do or be anything, kept running away to die.

My grandmother on my father's side, Neeny, told me that she never liked the way Mom looked at me. “She was obsessed with you. It just wasn't right.” I loved it, though, Mom really could light up a room or a rainy day like no one else. Besides, Neeny used to drive her Chrysler LeBaron around, wearing huge black postcataract surgery glasses, and scream at those GODDAMNED WOMEN DRIVERS!

My mom loved me so much it made me feel famous. But that had been a long time ago, and at around nine or ten, it stopped being so great. Her loving me that much was just a trick. Around that time, I also stopped wanting to be just like her. She was weak and needy, so I acted tough. Everyone was still compelled to say how alike we were, but I figured if I acted strong and practiced not giving a fuck, they would eventually stop saying, “You are just like your mother!” Boy, was I wrong.

The doctor wasn't even looking at me when he said it; he was writing something down for a nurse. It was so casual that he didn't seem to think that he was really dropping some bomb on my skull. He acted more as if he were reminding me of something I had always known, like my middle name or where my grandparents lived.

This happened during a bad visit. Generally speaking, a
bad
visit was anything from being turned away because Mom was too fucked up to see anyone or the hospital staff would let us up to see her, only to find out when we got there that she was too fucked up to see anyone, and
then
we'd have to leave.

On this day, it was the latter.

Mom was wasted and had thrown herself on the floor in front of us in the hallway begging for forgiveness, “Please don't hate me!” She cried and keened, her breath so pitifully short that she could barely talk. She collapsed on the floor in a dead heap, but was so tiny that my father and a nurse could scoop her up like a wet hand towel to help her walk down the hall back to her room. She was never really loud or scary, no wailing or screaming. She would bend under some inescapable sad weight, and slowly break in front of us.

As she slumped against them padding limply back down the hall, she begged my dad to forgive her and “Please don't stop loving me Henny, please . . .” She wept helplessly.

My brothers and I knew to stay put. John and Henry went around the corner to the common room. I hung back with Dr. Lovey.

Mom called everyone Lovey. If she knew you for five minutes, you were Lovey.

Her psychiatrists were no exception. They were all familiar characters as Mom got locked up more and more frequently, and I was used to being around them. It was nothing for me to chat with Dr. Lovey and practice being the tough little girl who was totally unfazed by the madness or sadness she'd just seen.

“Oh, well,” I shrugged, my sneakered heel bouncing on the floor.

“Your mom's been having a hard week, but she'll be okay, Stormy,” he said.

“Yeah, I know; it's no big deal.”

He was still writing with his head down. I hated the quiet.

“At least I'm not gonna be crazy like her. Right?”

You know when you ask a question you already know the answer to, and you're just trying to make conversation? You're being friendly, engaging, filling up any uncomfortable, quiet gaps? Like, “Dontcha just love chocolate?” or “What the heck is the deal about cats and Christmas tinsel anyway? You know it ends up in their poop, right? Stupid cats.”

I expected that he would guffaw and say, “Oh, silly girl, of course not!” Then he would ruffle the hair on my silly head as he passed by me on his way to do some doctoring elsewhere.

But, barely giving me a glance, Dr. Lovey nodded and said, “Oh. Well, yes. It's hereditary. You will absolutely end up like your mother.”

My heel stopped bouncing.

As he tore off the piece of paper he'd been scribbling on and got up to leave he said, I imagine to comfort me, “Probably not until your twenties, or when you have children, whichever comes first.”

All I remember after that was getting very hot in my face and standing very still in the doorway. I bit my cheeks, heard the ker-plip-ker-plop of ping-pong around the corner. I wanted to walk away, take back the question, go back in time, ask him about something else, change the subject, or shut up. But, instead, I was frozen. Dr. Lovey, on his way out, said something about how lucky I was that we knew so much about my mother's illness, now, so that when the time came for me to get treatment, not to worry, we'll know how to take care of it, then left.

Just like your mother.

My dad never mentioned it to me. At some point, I know, my mom and one of her Dr. Loveys had suggested examining us, but my father would have none of it. I remember hearing him say, when he
was recalling the let's-have-the-children-looked-at conversation with a friend of his, “You already got my wife, I'll be damned if you think I'm gonna give you my fucking kids.” Dad didn't call any of the doctors
Lovey;
he called them all a bunch of screaming assholes.

No, Dad wasn't going to send me into treatment. Hell, it pissed him off enough when I had to go to the hospital just to get stitches. In that regard, I knew I was safe.