Kinsey and Me (22 page)

that’s not an easy way to go

Later in my life when I’m asked what happened to her, I think I’ll just say, “Well,
we don’t know exactly what it was. She may have fallen into enemy hands. From the
look of her, she was tortured to death, and that’s not an easy way to go.”

S
HE STANDS AT
the foot of the stairs, one hand on the bannister, swaying slightly, smelling of cigarettes
and Early Times and Wrigley’s chewing gum. She has fallen near the telephone stand
in the front hall and her left arm is now cradled painfully against her waist. Jessie
stands on one side of her and I stand on the other and together we pull a pale blue
dress over her pale brown hair, easing it gently down over the injured arm.

“Does that feel all right?” I say to her, buttoning the front of the dress to support
her arm.

“Sure,” she says. “It doesn’t bother me at all.”

T
HERE ARE QUESTIONS
I could ask her, but I don’t. I could ask, for instance, how many jiggers of Early
Times she managed to drink while she stood in the pantry pretending to open a carton
of cigarettes, but she would say “none” and then I would have the lie to accept or
refute and at the moment, it doesn’t seem that important. I know and she knows that
she is drunk—though “drunk” of course is not the proper word to describe the condition
she’s in. She is simply beyond her tolerance for alcohol, a tolerance which has never
been great because she is, herself, a tiny person, barely five feet tall, weighing
not even a hundred pounds. If you took a delicate ten-year-old child and gave her
even a sample of fine bourbon, the result would be the same, except that the child
would not know enough, perhaps, to pretend otherwise.

My mother pretends that there is no pain when I know and she knows that we will shortly
discover a hairline fracture near her left shoulder. At the moment, I don’t even worry
about the drive to the hospital or the X-ray or the doctor’s confirmation. I worry
about the buttons on her dress and the knee-length stockings which are rolled down
around her frail ankles and the shoes which are fifteen years out of style. We dress
her, Jessie and I, saying nothing much and I am thinking as I smooth her fine pale
hair back into the hairpins that I am, in fact, being a mother to my mother. I am
nineteen and I am remembering the years—two years? three?—that I have been changing
places with her: taking her to the doctor’s office, buying her clothes, helping her
up to bed, giving her long, self-righteous lectures about her “drinking problem,”
which I had decided, at the age of fifteen, needed to be brought out in the open and
dispensed with once and for all. For three years I have been lecturing to her in this
manner, sitting in the living room in her small gray rocker, rocking as I speak, and
for three years she has been lying there on the couch, her eyes closed, a lighted
cigarette in her fingers, saying nothing. From time to time, I have extracted weighty
promises from her, promises which she seems utterly incapable of keeping especially
in the light of her constant denials of any such problem at all. The contradictions
are apparent but we choose, both of us, to ignore them so that we can get on with
the business at hand.

I have given up praying for her. I have given up even praying for myself and I’ve
taken instead to pouring hidden bottles of bourbon down the bathroom sink and filling
the bottles up with tepid tea. This is insidious, of course, because she discovers
the ruse almost at once but cannot admit it or acknowledge it, cannot even defend
the loss of so much expensive whiskey into the sewer systems of the world. And so
we continue, this woman and I, she feigning sleep, I intoning almost without conviction
the terrible price she will have to pay for her secret sins.

In the moment that I discover that I’m the mother to my mother, dressing her there
at the foot of the stairs, I feel both a sense of loss and resentment. It’s as though
in the very act of perceiving this, I have given something away which I will never
be able to retrieve. And at the same time, I know that whatever it is I’ve lost—whether
innocence or childhood or a simple illusion about the nature of our relationship—whatever
the loss, it’s something I gave away a long time ago, something I’ve merely retained
by default for some years.

I look at her closely: small round face, faded blue eyes, a shade of lipstick (far
too dark for her fair coloring), fragile skeleton, faintly fleshed out into the form
of a woman, aging and underfed. We have conversations, this woman and I, about what
she’s eaten in any given day which is never much. A piece of toast, she says, or soda
crackers broken up in a glass of milk. She’s burning up bourbon and she has no need
for food. Her bewildered body shrinks away from her, failing, failing, surrendering
up to malnutrition, pneumonia, some grief in her bones. From this pale remnant of
a person, I can work backward in my mind to a time when she was nineteen, too. There’s
a picture of her taken at Virginia Beach that year. She’s standing on the other side
of a pair of swinging doors, her legs visible beneath, her arms resting along the
top. The face is the same, small and round, and her hair is pale. She wears it in
long thin braids wrapped around her head in fine ropes. She is very tanned and her
smile is broad and free, her legs very shapely and firm. She remembers this time as
a good time in her life and she returns to it in her talking, rambling talk, as out
of fashion as her shoes. I have no notion in the world what has happened to her between
that time and this; only that some battle must have raged somewhere to take such a
toll from that once sturdy frame.

I know, as a matter of course and without dismay, that she’s attempted suicide twice
but she seems to be insincere in this and no one pays much attention. She might drink.
She might smoke forty cigarettes a day, eat little, scarcely stir from the place where
she lies all day long in the long dream of her life, but we cannot seem to understand
among us that she has no use for her life, lives with no joy at all, suffers some
secret silent anguish which is draining away, drop by drop, any reason of hers to
go on. She is simply with us and our collective acceptance of this fact will have
to serve as her motive for life. She is living because she hasn’t yet managed to die.
She has come one step closer now. She has fallen again, her body announcing with a
faint snap that it cannot go on much longer under the regimen of abuse and deprivation
which she has imposed upon it. She is winning a fifteen-year battle and she knows
it. Only the rest of us are not yet informed. We can see the evidence but the sight
has been before us for so long that we no longer register pity or amazement or despair.
I will understand in a year, or maybe five, that she is one of the loneliest women
in the world, this mother, but for now there is only this job to be done, the dressing
of her brittle body so that we may take it to the body mender to be fixed—bandaged
and glued and wrapped all around with gauze and adhesive tape. She suffers this to
be done though it seems to matter little to her. We insist that she go on living,
so she does, but only until the moment when she can outwit us—which she will—soon—in
her way.

In the meantime, she is ready and I help her out to the car. I forget now what we
talk about because it doesn’t matter much. She knows and I know that we will never
get around to the conversation we should really have and probably neither of us will
ever understand just why that is so. I take her to Norton’s Infirmary, to the parking
lot around in back where I always park when she’s been hospitalized, usually twice
a year. The sun is shining though it’s bitterly cold and I walk with her up the emergency
ramp, down the broad corridor with its mottled marble floor polished to a soft gleam,
to the elevator with its doors which shush us in and shush us out again on the fifth
floor, X-ray department.

Dr. Belton has called in advance and they take her in to be X-rayed, she denying any
pain, denying even the existence of her own soul if she could. The X-ray will show
it. One soul, sadly cracked in a way that no one can mend. Perhaps the doctor will
prescribe lots of alcohol, who knows? I sit in the hallway and smoke and stare out
at the window, where the branches of the trees are bitter and bare. Later in my life,
though I know nothing of it now, I will like hospitals. They will seem familiar to
me, a little like my mother, who has lived so many disconnected fragments under doctors’
care. Hospitals will always seem a little like the holiday they were when I was young
and she went in and my sister Del and I were at home, free for a little while of the
burden of caring for her. Hours and hours of my life have been spent in hospital corridors.
Hours and hours of my life have been spent waiting for her to come home.

After a day or two in the hospital, the difference in her is remarkable. Sober, she
is cheerful, as bright as a bird, roaming up and down the hall, into other patients’
rooms, where she visits with them. The nurses joke with her, hide in her room to smoke.
She is a favorite on the floor and when she leaves, they gather around her and wish
her luck, kiss her cheek, and bundle her warmly into her coat. And when she comes
home again, she begins to drink almost at once. Now and then to frighten her into
good behavior, we threaten to commit her to an institution—the doctors, my father,
and I. I think now we should really have done that, for her sake. She might have found
protection there, some peace, some sense of purpose in an otherwise pointless life.
Instead, ironically, she stays at home and suffers whatever it is she suffers: boredom,
frustration, loneliness, defeat, the worst diseases of mankind and she with some inherited
tendency for each.

We put her in. They fix her up and then we take her home again and none of us understand
what she’s dying of, what’s killing her one-two-three. It’s us. It’s me. It’s Del,
my father, and that house. It’s time; the past that looms up like a phantom, the future
rising up like a blank bare wall. She is a haunted lady whom nobody will abandon.
We stick by her. Loyal. True. And we are killing her with our misdirected virtues,
the apparitions of love instead of its flesh and blood. We are weighing her down with
our devotion and we cannot let her go. We will discover later, though we never admit
it among us, that it was she holding
us
together in her way. And I will know much later that I loved her. And I’ll know much
later that she loved me, too.

For the moment, I am sitting in this corridor, staring out at the bitter trees beyond,
while the medics declare her broken again and set about to mending her with plaster
and dry sticks. How will I tell her, driving home again, what has broken in me and
how will I make her understand that in the scheme of things, it is she who was meant
to mother me and I meant to receive?

lost people

I
N THE PANTRY,
there was a wide shelf of mahogany which smelled perpetually of bourbon. Above it
was a cabinet where the china plates were kept, cups and saucers, glasses, bowls,
and serving pieces. There were two drawers filled with cocktail napkins, sticky swizzle
sticks, corkscrews, pencils and a strange array of coasters, matches, chewing gum,
and string. My mother drank her bourbon there with her back turned, tossing down jiggers
of Old Crow and Early Times when she went to get a pack of cigarettes from one of
the cartons of Camels kept there on the shelf. My father drank his bourbon from the
same jigger glass, two every morning before he brushed his teeth. He told me once
that there was a time when he drank a fifth of Old Crow a day and still practiced
law, still argued his cases in court, wrote briefs and letters and legal opinions.
I can remember how proud I was that he could accomplish such a feat. All of my life,
my father did amazing things and the fact that he might become an accomplished alcoholic
came as no surprise to me. His drinking was a part of his daily routine and attracted
no notice from me. My mother’s drinking was another thing. I suppose I resented as
much as anything the fact that she did not handle herself as well as he did . . .
as though they might be in some competition between them for who might out-drink whom.
In the end she won . . . or perhaps he did because she’s dead and he still drinks.
For a while he quit. His drinking had triggered some peculiar malady that caused him
to lose half a day at a time. He drove a great deal through the state, trying legal
cases in obscure Kentucky towns, and every time he lost one, he would buy a pint of
bourbon. One night he drove his car into a muddy field in the rain and a carload of
teenaged boys found him standing amid the furrows, the rain beating down on his head.
He never knew why he had gone there or what he had done in the hours before and after
he was found. He had a gasoline receipt from a filling station in the town nearby.
He had driven a hundred miles on that tank of gas and at the end of it, he was standing
in the field, his car parked at a jaunty angle near the road. It bothered him to lose
that day and he curbed his drinking for a while. The doctor prescribed a medication
which would make him sick if he drank and after a time, he drank again anyway. My
mother never lost any time at all. She stood at the pantry shelf to drink and she
lay on the couch when she was done. She seldom drove anywhere and never in the rain.
There were no fields for her to find and no carloads of people coming after her to
save her from the wind, to rescue her out of the dark rows where she stood. Whatever
journey she took, she went by herself and in the course of her drinking, she never
remarked about lost days, or hours which she could not identify, nor time that she
could not find. Her intention, I think, was to give time away while his was to escape
it and both of them ended up in front of the same pantry shelf.

They shared the bottles of Early Times. They shared the cartons of Camels and the
swizzle sticks and chewing gum. They had shared more than that once upon a time and
where the past disappeared to, neither of them could say. They bought a house and
my mother swore she would never leave it until the day she died. And after she died,
the house was torn down and he married somebody else. He isn’t any happier now. Somehow
his twenty-eight years with Vanessa conditioned him to misery and he married a woman
who makes him suffer equally. She doesn’t drink much, this new wife. She doesn’t drive
him out into the rain but she complains about him all the time, and rails and chides
him for his frailties. Sometimes he smiles at me in a way I recognize. It is the smile
of a man being taken away on a stretcher to surgery. It’s probably the same smile
he smiled when they found him that night in the dark of the field.

Whether my mother ever smiled that way I cannot say.

My father is a very gentle man. He is a man of great intelligence, a man who has known
the law, and some of life and a little bit of the land where he grew up. He is a tall
man, lean and soft and graying, and his memory fails him now and then. He is a tired
man and he’s been tired all his life, a weary, driven man who cannot sleep. Once he
told me that he wanted written on his grave: Here lies the loneliest man who ever
lived.

My parents were lost people, refugees, and not from any country that I’ve seen, not
the victims of the known wars on this earth, but refugees in subtle battles fought
somewhere inside and won and lost and borders crossed and flags laid down. My parents
were the displaced . . . not of this world but from their lives, separated from themselves
somehow when all those inner wars came to an end.

They never found between them any separate peace, no common enemy, no alien pain but
only something savage, undefined and dread.

My inner child is like the sad-eyed waif in those paintings that used to be so popular.
Time to grow up, I think.