Riding Fury Home (6 page)

My father knew it was time to put her to bed in the evenings after she'd taken her sleeping pills when she could no longer coordinate bringing the cigarette to her mouth, hitting her cheek or chin with the unlit end.

Some nights I could hear them arguing in their bedroom while lying in the dark in my bedroom. Dad would be pleading, “Come on, Glor, put out the cigarette. You gotta go to sleep now.” I could tell he was trying to be nice, but he sounded mad.

“Not yet, Abe, pleeease, jus' one more cigarette,” Mom cajoled.

“Jesus Christ, Gloria!” Now he really was mad.

“Jus' one more pu . . . ” Mom's voice dropped off as she nodded off.

 

 

ONE DAY, I CAME HOME from school to find Mom sitting at the dining table; all her cameras and lenses lay on the table. She had a strange, lost expression, staring at the cameras like she couldn't quite see them.

“Hi, Mom.”

She looked up, as if startled out of a daydream. “I'm waiting for the man from the photography shop in Somerville. He's coming to buy my cameras.”

I wanted to ask why, but just then there was the crunching sound of a car coming down our gravel driveway. Mom got up.

Before she married Dad, my mother had had two careers: one as a laboratory chemist, the other as a portrait photographer. During the week, she worked in a research laboratory. On the weekends, she worked in her photography studio and darkroom in the basement of her parents' home. After she married Dad, she stopped doing much photography. There were almost no photos of me or Dad.

When Mom was away, I used to look through the cardboard box of her black-and-white photographs stashed in our back room. I was especially intrigued by the ones of Uncle Marvin, the brother Mom had been so close to. In his black turtleneck and beret, he looked like a beatnik artist. I stared at the photos, as if I could learn something of Mom that way.

Mom led the man to the table. I watched him pick up the cameras and lenses and the flash attachments, the wide-angle and
telephoto lenses, and examine them one by one. “Nice,” he said under his breath, as if he were alone and talking to himself, “Very nice.” Then louder, “Mrs. Wilson, I'll give you seventy-five bucks for the lot.”

Mom didn't argue, just stood there silently while he counted out the money into her hand.

 

 

TOWARD THE END OF fourth grade, I began to brag at school that my family was spending the next year in England. My father had been awarded a research grant to work abroad for a year. The plan was for us all to move to London. I was wild with excitement, imagining that Mom and Dad and I would live in an exotic foreign country with Big Ben and people who talked with funny accents, where everything would be different, including us.

But then Mom began to get worse. She was weak from an increased dosage of pills and stumbling around the house. She began to say she didn't want to go. Mom's psychiatrist called Dad and said he doubted Mom could cope with such change. It was decided: Mom and I would stay in Millstone; Dad would go alone to England. Dad hired a neighbor woman, an elderly widow, to come live with us, to cook and be a companion to Mom.

At the beginning of the summer, Mom and I saw Dad off. He was traveling on the
Queen Elizabeth,
the largest ocean liner in the world. We took the train into New York City, and a taxi to the harbor. At the dock, the gigantic ship loomed with its rows and rows of windows, smoke already rising from its two red smokestacks tipped with black. We went on board with Dad for the hour they let the friends of travelers visit. We wandered the huge ship, along its teak decks, into ballrooms with elaborate wood trim and
gilt chandeliers as if on a family outing, as if I wasn't about to lose a father, the one parent who had taken care of me for as long as I could remember.

The deep bass warning whistle blew—
all visitors ashore
. I was numb as Dad hugged me goodbye. Mom took my hand and we walked down the gangplank. We stood on the pier, looking up, and waving. My hand fluttered in the air, as if detached from my body. The tugboats pushed the great ship into the New York harbor until the people on deck became tiny figures.

I kept waving.
Bye, Dad, bye.

MRS. KELLER, THE WIDOW Dad had hired to live with Mom and me, never showed up. Her adult children talked her out of it. “What if something happens?” they asked. “You'd be held responsible. It's not worth it.”

It took two weeks for that news to cross the Atlantic Ocean and reach my father. He left his laboratory at Imperial College and made his way to the Thames, where he sat on a stone barricade, weeping. Then, he paced the London streets.
What to do?
Years later, in my thirties, I confronted him: “How could you have left me there, alone with Mom?” Dad answered, “I was desperate. I was drowning. I would have thrown my own mother to the dogs.”

My father left me with a mother I barely knew. During the year he was gone, I formed an intense, fierce attachment with her.

Each night, after my mother took her sleeping pills, she resisted sleep. Even as the medication dragged her under, some fear in her battled against tumbling into her dreams. She sat up in bed, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips as her head began to nod. I
sounded just like Dad: “Come on, Mom, put it out!” I'd plead. “Jusss one more puff,” she slurred. When I switched off her bedroom light, the burning orange orb of her Tareyton glowed in the dark room. I'd go back, grab the cigarette, and smash it in the ashtray. Sometimes I'd swipe her pack of Tareytons out of reach. “Goddamnit, Mom, no more!”

After Dad left, Mom started sleeping downstairs in the study. Upstairs in my bed I worried about fire, slept with my nostrils flared for the smell of a smoldering mattress. With Mom that far away, I had to listen hard. My body became a tuning fork; even in sleep, my ears stayed alert for the stagger and thud of Mom's falling on the uncarpeted floor in her midnight forays to the toilet. I'd jolt up in response, racing downstairs to haul Mom up off the floor, grabbing her under the armpits. With one of her arms over my shoulder, we'd lurch to the bathroom and back to her bed.

Once under the covers, if Mom was restless or insisting on a cigarette, I started to do something my father had not done: crawl in bed next to her. I bribed her with a promise. “Lie down, Mom. I'll help you get to sleep.” She'd turn on her side and I would spoon behind her, stroking her damp, sweaty hair, singing quietly. If I started to doze, I was startled awake as soon as Mom fell asleep.
Your mother has a deviated septum,
Dad had said when I asked about her incredibly loud snoring. Her snores rattled sleep from me. I'd slip out from under the covers and stumble upstairs. So tired.

Back in my bed, the spirals of sleep pulled on me, but trees creaked as the wind came up. The faces of wolves hovered at my second story window, just out of sight. Some part of me knew they weren't real. A branch hit my window, and I stifled a scream. No matter how piercing my yell, I knew Mom would never hear me. She was totally deaf in one ear, and she was sleeping the death sleep of
Doriden. Better to huddle under the covers, clamped and shivering, than to give voice to fear.

 

 

DURING THE DAY, MOM was relatively able—sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what, I never knew. Her daytime medications, the sedatives and tranquilizers, didn't knock her down into staggering oblivion like the nightly sleeping pills. She managed to keep us fed. After school, I came home to my mother's kiss, her welcome of “Hi, darling,” and a snack—apple slices with Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese, Pepperidge Farm goldfish, and a glass of milk, or sour cream and blueberries sprinkled with sugar. Then there was my after-school routine of doing homework and a half hour of piano practice, after which I would run over to Barbie's—two houses away—and play until dinner.

When we were alone, the protectiveness I felt toward my mother around others ebbed away. The anger that I tried to bury would erupt, but only at insignificant matters. I hated the noises Mom made when she ate. Her teeth had rotted while she was in the hospital, and the dentist there had extracted all her upper and some lower teeth. She had come home, at thirty-eight, with a full upper set of dentures and a partial bridge. The false teeth clicked as she chewed. Sometimes I'd yell, “What are you,
a pig!?”
When she simply shrugged, or her eyes got moist with tears, I felt terribly guilty. But I couldn't seem to stop my nasty remarks.

Sometimes on the weekends, we would go to the movies in Princeton. Once, Mom and I were breezing along River Road, a windy two-lane. It was a crisp fall afternoon and we were going to a matinee. My mother was in a reasonably good mood, and her driving phobia hadn't kicked in, so I relaxed in the passenger seat of our
Hudson and watched the orange and gold foliage pass by, trailing my hand out the side of the car, feeling the rush of air. As always, my mother was smoking a cigarette. When she was down to the filter, she stabbed it in the ashtray with her right hand, her left hand on the wheel; then, flinging her right arm across her chest, she flicked the butt out the window. This interrupted my reverie because I had to dig another Tareyton out of her purse while she punched in the cigarette lighter.

Princeton's only movie theater stood in the center of the small, neat upper-class town with its Gothic university buildings. It was almost as if a cloak of hush had been draped over the town, an air of restraint epitomized in the muted plaids and dull tans of expensive preppie outfits. It made me feel especially conscious to act right and not stick out.

We parked in the lot behind the theater, stopped in the lobby for refreshments. When the theater lights dimmed, I was swept into the cinema world—the aroma of salty butter, the crunch of popcorn, the sweetness of Coca-Cola, the sound of Raisinets running along their cardboard container into my hand.

After a matinee, there was always the shock to find it still daylight. But that was nothing compared with what Mom and I found when we got to our car. Firemen in their black helmets and yellow raincoats had pulled the back seat onto the parking lot asphalt, and they were just finishing spraying it with fire extinguishers. Stinking black smoke wafted up. The seat was incinerated, and I could see its metal springs poking through the charred padding. Our car was a spectacle, and a cluster of people was gawking in silence.

One of the firemen came over to my mother, as we stood staring at the car seat. “Ma'am, this your car?”

Mom nodded and smiled weakly.

“Did you have a lit cigarette that you didn't put out properly?”

Shame flamed in me, prickling my skin.

“I thought I had,” she answered. “I stubbed it out and threw it out the window.”

“Well, Ma'am, be more careful next time.” He stated the obvious, like my mother was some kind of simpleton. I wanted to escape, disappear. Here we were again, Mom and me, standing out, looking weird.
Is it both of us, or just my mother?

As the spectators began to drift away, the firemen loaded the charred frame of the seat into its place in the back of our car. The one who had talked to Mom raised his hand to his brim and wiggled his hat at Mom before they left.

“Let's get the hell out of here,” Mom said.

 

 

ON SATURDAYS, GRANDMA MIRIAM and Grandpa Isidor often showed up, not in Grandpa's green grocery van, but gliding down our driveway in their huge boat of an Oldsmobile. Grandma was too elegant to ride in a van. They always came with groceries from Grandpa's store, and the makings of brunch from Tabach-nick's, a Jewish deli near their house.

One Saturday, they bustled in, Grandpa unpacking the groceries into our fridge and freezer, while Grandma set out the spread of lox, bagels, cream cheese, whitefish, pickled herring, potato salad, and coleslaw. Like every visit, Grandma looked Mom over, frowning. Most days, Mom wore a dirty gray sweatshirt over jeans or sweatpants. Grandma prided herself in being a sharp dresser. She encased her fleshy torso in a full-length girdle, over which she wore fitted dresses, always adorned with a necklace and matching earrings. “Why don't you fix yourself up, Gloria?”

Mom glared at her. “We're not going to the opera here. Don't forget, Pop and I are going to work on the yard.”

As soon as brunch was over, Mom, Grandpa, and I went outside. Grandpa did the heavier chores: cutting back blackberry vines, bleeding air from the well, chopping firewood from the now-seasoned black walnut tree a groundhog had felled. His bald head would shine with sweat as he swung the axe, splitting logs. Grandpa was not a talker. Once, I had asked what his life had been like, before, in Poland. But all he said was, “We were ignorant peasants. We knew nothing. There's nothing to tell.” Now, I found comfort in Grandpa's steady practicality, his silence, the
swish
and
whap
of the axe hitting wood.

Nearby, Mom and I had our own project, planting pachysandra against the front of the house. Mom and I each knelt with our trowels, digging little holes in the earth. Aunt Rita, an avid gardener, had donated the groundcover from her large suburban garden. The pachysandra had fluted, dark green leaves and a single root. Over and over, Mom and I repeated the same action: twisting the root into a tight circle, holding it that way with one hand in the hole while troweling dirt with the other, then, with two hands, leaning into the dirt with the weight of our bodies, pressing it down. It was a boring and soothing task. I daydreamed as we planted, relaxing in the safety of the mundane.

Inside the house, Grandma had a pot roast baking in the oven. While it cooked, she straightened up the disorder of our daily life, the clutter of newspapers left on the floor, the unopened mail. We had an early dinner together, and before she and Grandpa left, she'd look around the tidied-up house and say, “There, isn't that better!” as if all would be well.