Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (22 page)

This comment irritates me. In another situation, I could imagine him testifying at a Wednesday night service, in a pious I’m-so-grateful-for-Christian-Science voice, “We’ve been so beautifully protected, her sister even forgot Jo’s fiftieth birthday!”—as if Aunt Mary
not
sending a card is evidence of prayers being answered.

It never occurs to him that Aunt Mary might not have wished her happy birthday specifically out of respect for Mom’s religious views.

But I wonder if Aunt Mary, like Aunt Nan, tried to call Mom on her birthday and got a bad feeling. Maybe that’s why Mimi called me.

“You’re putting me in a very difficult position with Mimi,” I say. “You’re asking me to lie.”

The tension is building. It feels like we’re headed for another fight.

“Look, if Mom comes up again, have Mimi call me,” he says. This sounds to me, remarkably, like a tiny opening. “Although,” he adds, “I don’t know what I’ll say to her.”

I am sitting
in Mimi’s studio apartment in Greenwich Village, smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of wine at her small café table. I am watching
The Cosby Show—The Cosby Show
, as if nothing’s wrong!—while Mimi stands in her bathroom with the door open, applying her makeup.

“So, what have you been up to?” she asks. “You’re never around.”

“Work,” I say.

“Been out at all?”

“Not really.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I say, shrugging my shoulders.

I take a long drag on the cigarette. I can tell Mimi is eyeing me in the mirror.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I say, trying not to sound defensive. “Yeah, why?”

There is a long silence before Mimi turns to look at me.

What am I to do? I cannot look her—my cousin, my best friend, my mom’s sister’s daughter—in the eye and lie any longer.

“Everything’s not okay,” I blurt out.

Mimi waits.

“Mom’s sick.”

Mimi pulls up a chair and puts her arms around me. I rest my head on my folded arms and begin to cry.

I confess everything to Mimi, just as I did to Aunt Nan a few days earlier.

Mimi tells me she will respect Mom’s wishes and keep her illness a secret. I don’t know whether I feel better or worse.

A few days later, Aunt Nan calls to say that she spoke with Dad, and he told her that Mom was “working out a problem” and that she was staying at Tenacre. When Aunt Nan asked if she could visit Mom, or at least talk to her, Dad said no: If Mom knew that Aunt Nan—or anyone else—had knowledge of her situation, she would be very upset. “Already I’m betraying Jo’s wishes by admitting anything at all,” he said to his sister. “I’m not going to risk upsetting her. Nor am I going to undermine her efforts to rely on Christian Science.”

Olivia, Terry, Sherm
, and I are all in Hopewell. Olivia and Terry are en route to Arizona, where Terry will be starting law school in
the fall. Their U-Haul sits unhitched in our parents’ driveway. It is a somber gathering. Olivia is worried about being so much farther away from Mom.

To “celebrate” the Independence Day holiday, we all go to Tenacre to sit with Mom and Dad and watch the televised festivities for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. We eat Nilla wafers, drink ginger ale, and watch the fireworks display on a television suspended from the ceiling. It feels like we are in a nursing home with a centenarian, not with our mother, who is only fifty. After the fireworks are over, we turn off the TV and call Grandma in Minnesota to wish her a happy Fourth, Mom expending all of her energy to sound chipper. The occasion is anything but happy. We all play our parts in the charade, and then we leave, angry.

A few days later, I am back at work, and my French office mate, Ann-Isabel, asks if I want to skip out early and catch a movie.

On the street, we squint as we dig into our handbags for sunglasses. The air in midtown is lighter and cooler than the day before, when the midsummer city stench of urine, garbage, and street-vendor food blinded and choked. Today, Manhattan feels like the island it is. We can smell the ocean.

“How are things at home?” Ann-Isabel asks. Whenever she approaches the sensitive subject, her tone softens and her musical French voice creeps higher.

I sigh and shrug. I don’t really want to talk about it.

“Did you talk to your mother today?”

“Yeah, she sounds the same.”

Ann-Isabel means well by her concern. Her own mother died when she was a teenager and over the last several months, Ann-Isabel has shared her story. Together, we have drawn comparisons—unintentionally but unavoidably—which I have come to resent.
Just because your mother died doesn’t mean mine is going to
. My relationship with Ann-Isabel has always been the nicest part of my job, but lately it has felt like more of a burden.

“How’s your father?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “He never tells us anything.”

Ann-Isabel and I walk a few blocks in silence.

“He’s planning on teaching his class in a few weeks,” I say.

“What kind of class?”

I don’t have the energy to explain the intricacies of Christian Science. I wish I hadn’t brought it up. “It’s just a thing he does every year. A course that Christian Scientists take.”

“You know, your dad has to go on with his life,” Ann-Isabel says. However well intended, her words sound to me like a comment for a widower’s daughter.

“You never know how long something like this will go on,” she adds. “Your father can’t just drop everything.”

We go to see
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
. Matthew Broderick is lying in bed in his suburban Chicago bedroom. He is planning the perfect day of hooky from school when I feel a rush of adrenaline, and my heart starts racing. Nothing has happened in the movie to provoke that kind of reaction. There have been no screams. No blood. No car chases, not yet. I’m thinking it is claustrophobia, but I’ve never been phobic. I try to ignore the heart palpitations and the anxious feeling that is coursing through my body. Gripping the armrests of my chair as inconspicuously as I can, I try to breathe evenly and wonder if my distress is noticeable to Ann-Isabel. Eventually, the anxiety subsides. But while Ann-Isabel and the other patrons in the theater laugh, I grow restless. At the end of the film, Ann-Isabel stays to catch the last half of another movie. I head home.

Somewhere on the five-block stretch between the theater and my apartment, I start feeling panicky again, but this time it doesn’t go away. It feels like an overcharged bout of stage fright: butterflies in my stomach, tingling in my fingertips, between my shoulder blades, behind my eyes. Could I be having a heart attack? I feel as if the buildings on either side of Third Avenue are getting taller and closer. The traffic is a bombardment of noise and motion, total confusion. My apartment is only a few blocks away. If I keep walking, one step after another, I’ll get there.

At last I am at the front door of my apartment building. Three flights of stairs, and I’ll be home.

By the time I reach the door to my apartment and fumble with the keys, I realize that this is the last place I want to be. I don’t want to face the mess: the trash I need to take out; the clean clothes I need to fold; the answering machine, which might, at any moment, convey terrible news.

The phone is ringing. Right after I pick it up, I think, What am I doing? I don’t want to speak to anyone.

Maybe it’s a wrong number.

I cover the mouthpiece with my hand because I realize I am panting.

“Loosh?”

It is Stephanie, my Brown roommate. She knows about Mom. I told her back in January, when Mom went to Tenacre; I figured my secret was safe with her. Since then, we haven’t talked much. I suspect that my situation at home is impossible for her to comprehend, since she is the daughter of a doctor.

“Lucia? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I say. “Well, maybe not … I can’t feel my fingers. Or my hands,” I say, perplexed. They are completely numb.

“Lucia, I want you to listen to me,” Stephanie says. “Take a deep breath.”

I try to, but I am shuddering.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Go unlock your door so I can get in.”

“Yes,” I say, like I’m some kind of robot.

Stephanie’s voice is reassuring, but again, as soon as I replace the phone on its hook, I panic. I am hot. I feel disgustingly drunk—even though I’ve drunk nothing—and so foggy that I may puke. I make my way into the bathroom. My head throbs with the congestion of crying. I sit on the edge of the bathtub, elbows on my knees. A wave of nausea washes over me, so I sink to the floor and wrap the
bath mat around my shoulders. The mat warms my bare arms. The floor’s cold tiles soothe my face.

“Lucia?” Stephanie calls from the entry.

“I’m in here,” I yell back, getting up from the floor. I head to the front door. The nausea and tingling have passed. I turn around and notice a large black garbage bag overflowing with newspapers, junk mail, and coffee grounds. A withered ficus plant stands in one corner of the room.

“Hi, Steph,” I say. “I’m okay. How do you like my blotchies?” I ask, trying to make light of my swollen eyes. I am uncomfortable having her see me like this.

Stephanie sits on the club chair in the living room and starts pulling things from a grocery bag.

“I brought some salad and a couple of beers,” she says. “Want some?” She gestures with the clear plastic container from the deli.

“I’m not really hungry.”

She pulls out her pack of Marlboro Lights and offers me one. I take two and walk over to the gas stove to light one for each of us.

“Now. Tell me what happened,” Stephanie says. I hand her back a lit cigarette.

“I don’t know,” I say, shaking my head. “Ann-Isabel and I left work early to see a movie. I was feeling a little shaky anyway, I guess, and when the lights came up, and I started walking home—something just … hit me. I started freaking out.”

I return to the kitchen to get us an ashtray.

“Maybe it was seeing a movie where everything works out in the end,” I say.

“How’s your mom?”

“Shitty. The same, I guess. Maybe worse.”

“I thought she was back at home,” Stephanie says.

“She was. But three weeks ago Dad and I had a huge fight about the whole thing. Mom overheard it, and two days later she was back
at Tenacre. They’ve been talking about
progress
for months—since Christmas—but, Stephanie, it’s all bullshit. It’s really bad. She’s never going to get better.”

I pull smoke deep into my lungs. I’m beginning to feel shaky again—the nicotine probably doesn’t help—but while the smoke remains in my lungs, I stay in control. Exhaling brings on a storm of tears, and heat, and shaking.

“Oh, God. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.”

Stephanie comes over to the couch and rubs my back.

“Is there somebody we can call?” Stephanie asks.

“It won’t change anything.”

“How about Mimi? Does she know?”

“She knows. She’s going to honor Mom’s privacy, which is what I asked her to do. So is my aunt Nan.”

I decide I will call Dad and tell him that I intend to call Aunt Lucia, but I don’t want to go behind his back. Aunt Lucia used to teach a course on counseling at Yale Divinity School; maybe she’ll know what to do.

I tell Stephanie my dad’s phone number, and she dials it for me. The phone is back in my hand and ringing. Dad answers. I am crying again.

“Lucia?”

I don’t say anything. I’m so angry, I want him to hear me. All of this is his fault. His, and his goddamned church’s.

“Loosh?” His voice is gentle, and it makes me cry harder. He sounds fatherly.

“What’s wrong, Loosh?”

What’s wrong?

“Dad, I really can’t do this anymore. I need help.”

“What kind of help are you thinking of?” he asks in a tone I can’t interpret. Does he think I’m calling him for help? Christian Science help?

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe if I talk to someone—”

“Well, who do you have in mind?” The softness of his voice is laced with something.

“I don’t know.” I pause. “Maybe Aunt Lucia.”

The suggestion is like a lit match to kerosene.

“Aunt Lucia? You don’t even know Aunt Lucia!”

This is essentially true, and my father pointing it out makes me feel stupid. I have never had a single meaningful conversation with his sister. She is a person I see only at Thanksgiving. But I think: If there is anyone in the family who might be able to deal with this, it is she. And maybe Aunt Lucia, together with Aunt Nan, will do something.

“Well, maybe I don’t know her very well,” I say, “but I feel close to her.”

“Close to her? First of all, young lady”—my father’s voice gets louder. I hold the phone away from my ear and look over at Stephanie, who is watching me—“your aunt Lucia is in Alaska with Aunt Nan and Uncle Dave. You can’t even reach her.”

“Aunt Nan gave me their itinerary,” I let slip and wonder if my father will question why his sister has done such a thing. But he is already listing the reasons why Aunt Lucia won’t speak to me.

“She’s on vacation. She doesn’t know the first thing about Christian Science. She doesn’t want to hear your sniveling …”

I shake my head.

“Put Olivia on the phone,” I say.

Moments later, “What’s goin’ on?”

Now the three of us are on the phone. Thank God my sister is in Hopewell. She and Terry don’t leave for Tucson for another few days. I feel homesick. I want Mom. I want things to be the way they were before she got sick. I start to sob again.

“Olivia, I need help. I can’t do this anymore. I think maybe I should call Aunt Lucia.”

“I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life!” Dad interjects. “Honestly, you kids have no regard for what we’re trying to
do! What we’re up against! You’re just going to stab us in the back, aren’t you? I can’t believe it! And now you’re going to turn my family against us.” He pauses. “That’s real gratitude!”