Impossible Vacation (6 page)

Then Mom hung up and began to pace again and tear at her hair and pick at her ears and tried to repeat the phrases the practitioner had told her. But they came out all mixed up and broken like, “Disposes of evil—man is not error—error is not man.” I just sat there on the couch, I just sat there staring at her thinking, What the fuck is happening to this woman? The whole world was breaking down and falling apart. The whole house was shifting; I was getting dizzy and had to run outside, where I threw up green stomach bile that ended in dry heaves. When I came back in, this frantic birdlike creature was running from window to window as though she couldn’t get out.

That was the day I clearly saw, once again, how like a sky hook that wasn’t there when she needed it, the Christian Science wasn’t working for Mom. It was one of those pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps situations, but there were no more bootstraps. One part of the mind has to be the bootstraps for the other part, and all parts of Mom’s mind seemed to have gone.

By late morning Mom had decided to take a bath. I wanted to
trust her but I couldn’t stop myself from pacing outside the bathroom door, calling in every so often over the sound of the running water. The sound of light splashing in the tub produced even more fear in my mind. “Are you all right in there?” I called in. But there was no answer, just a little sound of water splashing. I was sure she didn’t have a straight-edge razor. I knew we didn’t have one in the house and I didn’t think she was capable of driving anywhere to buy one.

After her bath Mom seemed calmer. She came out dressed in her pink robe looking just like a normal suburban housewife and curled up on the couch to read the
Christian Science Monitor
. I thought now that she was a little calmer it might be a good time to try again to introduce her to a few well-chosen passages from Alan Watts. But Mom would hear none of it. As soon as I started to read to her she lifted her newspaper up and made a kind of paper wall between us. I put all my anger into my index finger, curled it back tight against my thumb, fired, and hit that paper wall with a hard snap. Pop! My finger exploded against that newspaper like a shot, and Mom almost jumped off the couch. Then, quickly composing herself, she looked me clearly and directly in the eye and with that crazy bird gone out of her now, she said, “Oh, Brewster dear—how shall I do it? How shall I do away with myself? Shall I do it in the garage, with the car?”

I don’t remember what happened after that. I don’t know if I said anything back. I was amazed at her clarity. Something inside of me knew that for her it was time to go, that she had made a decision.

I made no effort to hide the keys to either of the cars. I did not tell Dad what she had said to me. It was as though Mom and I had made one last private pact together. Perhaps I was trying to help some sad sick part of her, which had now become almost the only part of her left, to die. But it was not as clear to me then as it seemed to be to her.

That night things got a little better before they got worse again. Every night around what was the traditional cocktail hour Mom would seem to get worse. She’d go into this double-bind behavior: by then she was looking at Dad as her keeper, and she knew that if she acted weird in any way he’d pack her off to the sanitarium again; but the effort to act sane only made her more insane. Every night, just before Dad was due home, she would go try to make dinner and end
up standing over the stove staring out the window into the encroaching woods like some fearful Pilgrim anticipating an Indian attack. She’d just stand there stamping her saddle shoes, which made her look like some weird cheerleader. She’d stamp and stamp and stare, trying to get it together to cook frozen peas, saying over and over again, “Don’t let your father see me this way. I’m all right, I’m okay—perfect reflection of God—there is no error. Please don’t let your father see me this way.” Then Dad would come home and give her a peck on the cheek and she would relax a little bit and ease into making the rest of the dinner with her mad birdlike flutters of panic surfacing here and there. Then Dad would fix himself a tall bourbon and, seeing that crazy bird in her, would begin to realize things weren’t going well.

It was just the three of us then. Topher was away with Gram; Cole was away in Spain studying some dead existential Spanish writer. The three of us remained in this strange kind of triangle. I was afraid to pull out of it because I thought the whole thing would collapse. Only a void would be left, some dark yawning impossible gap, only darkness after so many years of shared history, of good and bad times together.

Odd, or worse than odd, that it should come to this after all these years: the mother bird gone mad. And yet that night after
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
we were still able to rally after all the confusion and madness of the day and Mom’s confessions of wanting to do away with herself. We were still able to rally around Dad’s surprising suggestion that we all go to the movies together. At last Dad had come through, and with flying colors. Not only did he want to go to the movies, but he wanted to go to a drive-in, to see, of all things,
Mary Poppins
, which he probably thought would be a healthy antidote to the horrors of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I laughed to myself at the thought of Virginia Woolf meeting Mary Poppins on some stark New England moor.

We went in Mom’s car, a red Corvair convertible. It was a warm summer night, and Dad even put the top down. At the last minute I thought it might be fun for me to try to get in free. So I took a blanket off the backseat, lay down on the back floor, and covered myself. I could tell that Dad was proud of me in some way, almost like he thought I was being enterprising or something. For a moment Mom
even slipped back into her old normal self, and suddenly we were all together again. Mom and Dad were sitting in the front seat like lovers, and I was wrapped in a blanket on the back floor like a child waiting to be born.

The following day things took a turn for the worse. Mom hadn’t slept that night. She became like that anxious bird again, and when Dad went to pack up her little suitcase to take her back to the sanitarium, she got even wilder, running from room to room trying to avoid being caught and put back into the cage for those awful old shock treatments she couldn’t bear.

At last, completely exasperated, Dad asked me to help round her up and get her into the Corvair, which by now had the top up. She tried to call her Christian Science practitioner, but Dad wouldn’t allow it. He made her get in the front seat between us so she wouldn’t try to jump out. I was as firm as I could be with her but my words sounded hollow and distant, as if I were doing a bad reading of someone else’s script: “C’mon, Mom, we are only trying to do what is best for you.”

The trip to the sanitarium was one of those rides that take no time and forever. At last, when we were right outside the heavy stone gates, so different from the happy gates at the drive-in movie the night before, Mom pulled her hand away from mine and, putting both hands over her mouth, looked up at the gates of the sanitarium and cried out in horror, “Oh, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

D
AD AND
I didn’t talk much driving home, just a few words about the weather and how there wasn’t a whole lot of traffic for a Saturday. Dad stopped at the liquor store to stock up. When we got home we watched the Red Sox game on TV and got quietly drunk together.

The following day I knew I had to get out of there. I was in a total panic, as if the house were on fire. I thought of fleeing to Melissa on Block Island, but when I called her she sounded all cranky and whiny. She said she had a bad case of poison ivy on her left thigh and
really had no place of her own to put me up, so I decided very quickly to just hitchhike to New Paltz, New York, to see Joe McCreedy, the man I’d shared that mad, life-saving dance with.

It only took me four rides to get to New Paltz. Not bad. But I was younger then, and those were the old days when people would take chances picking you up on the highway.

My first ride was in a red-hot MG convertible. There were two guys in it, and they shoved me in the back behind their bucket seats, where I knelt with my head above the windshield like a dog in the wind until they let me off on Route 128 just outside of Boston.

I stood there for quite a long while, but it didn’t matter how long I waited; it just felt good to be out there in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of time. I thought I was beginning to learn how to hang out. I was suspended between Rhode Island and some unknown future point waiting for me in New Paltz.

Then I saw this big, bright powder-blue Cadillac, which was going in the other direction at first, make a sweeping U-turn and slowly cruise back to pick me up. The car reeked of perversion. It smelled of cheap cigars and puke. All the windows were up, and all the electric controls were on a central switchboard to the right of the driver, who looked like a combination of an Italian butcher and a Greek barber. He was enormous and gross and he had big, hairy forearms and a big moon face with a set of lips that looked like they could suck you whole. He also had three or four gold chains around his neck with black hairs bristling out between them. And what was worse was that he didn’t really speak to me—only “Buckle up” and “Where ya off to?” I think I said something like “Upstate New York,” in a dry and nervous little boy’s voice. I was dressed only in cutoffs and a sweatshirt, with the rest of my stuff in a knapsack on my back. I could feel his dark black eyes go all along, up and down my thighs. Then he began to throw some of those electric switches on his control board. My seat was a separate bucket seat, something like a modern dentist’s chair.
Buzz, buzz, buzz
, the seat went flat out and all I could see was the plush ceiling. And then
buzz, buzz
, up it went again. Strapped into my safety belt, I began to feel a little claustrophobic. “Just tell me how you like it,” he said in a thick, fat, heavy voice, like he had a clump of warm mashed potatoes stuck in his throat. “Oh,
that’s fine, that’s good,” I said. “I like it just up and normal, so I can see out, you know? I love to see out. That’s why I travel in the day. I like to see where I’m going.” After ten miles or so, he just stopped and let me out. Without a word. That was that. He made another U-turn and headed back toward Boston.

The next ride I got was a Chevy van with two guys in the front and one guy in a wheelchair in the back. The guy in the wheelchair had just come home from Vietnam, where he had received some horrid spinal injury, and would most likely never walk again. He said that when he shot his first “gook” he was so freaked out that he forgot to take his finger off the trigger of his automatic and he cut the guy right in two.

My last ride was with a man who sold Tupperware, and that was all he told me about himself. He had an easy-listening channel tuned in on his radio and after I got in he never looked at me once. He brought me right to the outskirts of New Paltz.

I had no problem finding Joe McCreedy’s bookstore. There it was—Wyoming Books—right in the middle of town. I walked into that beautiful little bookstore to find Joe involved with a very intense woman. They were standing by the front window arguing over an idea for a window display and had reached a standoff. Joe was saying, “It matters to me,” and she was yelling back, “But don’t you think it matters to me?” And back and forth it was going like that as they fought like two kids, each trying to get their way; only I could see that she had already won just by how much more passionately she was expressing her needs.

I was immediately drawn to her strong, angry face, beautiful in its rage as she stood there with one raised blue vein on her forehead, screaming one final time, “But it matters to me, Joe! It matters to me!” Joe turned away from her and walked into the back of the bookstore. I didn’t move. I stood there smitten, watching this woman, now suddenly empty of rage, carefully arranging the window display exactly to her liking. I just stood there feeling my whole being focus through hers. I stood there thinking that I’d made the trip just to meet her.

Joe and I had a shaky reunion in the back of the bookstore. He was happy and surprised to see me, but I could tell he had not fully
recovered from that argument. We sat and talked. Joe told me things were going fine for him since he had escaped the draft. He was running the bookstore with his girlfriend, Diane, and that passionate woman at the window was her sister, Meg.

Joe and Diane let me stay in the back of the bookstore on a little cot until they could figure out how to put me to work. Then after a few days they decided that I could help Meg make the weekly runs to buy books at a wholesale house in lower Manhattan. I liked this idea a lot.

I loved the long drives down to New York with Meg. They really gave me a chance to space out and get uncomplicated again and try to learn to hang out. I also liked Meg’s company. On the other side of her rage, I found a calm center that I could be quiet with. It was as though there was an unspoken understanding between us. When we got to New York we’d spend the whole day in the book warehouse, browsing in what was essentially a giant library. We would get lost in the aisles of books, only to meet by chance to share ideas and information instead of kisses. It was like spending a rainy day with a friend in a giant library that contained as much as you’d ever want to know about the world outside. It was a windowless protected world of its own where I felt safe at last.