Death Grip (5 page)

My parents and I had stopped there on a driving tour of the Southwest. Standing by a guardrail, I'd taken one bite of a Red Delicious apple then flung it capriciously into the abyss. Off to the side, two climbers were rappelling off the guardrail, and I asked my parents if I could ask them to retrieve the apple, or if I could go down there with them. The men looked like superheroes, wearing sit harnesses, red helmets, and bedecked with glinting metal carabiners, their stubbled jaws beaded with sweat.

“I don't think so, Matthew,” my father said, chuckling. “Your apple is gone.”

And it had been the last apple, I was told. There would be no others that day. I bawled, “My apple-buh-buh-buh-my apple-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-I want my apple back!” as my parents led me to the car, the void pulling at my back. I've heard climbing described as a search for that magical place “where rock meets sky,” a metaphor perhaps for how man transposes his eternal quest for meaning, for God, onto the mountains. Each boulder, cliff, wall, and peak has its particular curl of light and unique angulations, its peculiar sliver of sky, all in flux from instant to instant; you can climb the same rock hundreds of times, yet meet the sky a new way with each ascent. You could say then that I climb not only to find the place where rock meets sky, but also where the Grand Canyon meets the apple.

It's as good a reason as any.

All children take naturally to climbing, but I was an especial fanatic: I was often up in a mulberry tree in our backyard, contriving vertical narratives as I threaded my way from limb to limb, seeing how high I could go before the cross branches grew too slender. Whenever we hiked out of the Sandias, I'd beg my parents to let me scramble on the trailhead boulders while they sat on the rear bumper of our red VW Dasher, rubbing sore feet, applying ointment to blisters. Amorphous white granite blobs, the foothills blocks poked up amidst copses of scrub oak, and tracts of cholla and barrel and prickly pear cactus. I would navigate the boulders' gentlest facets in my Keds, scrabbling between black extruded xenolith knobs, my mother watchful below, warning me not to fall into the cactus. Once, at around age eight, I convinced her to drive me up there specifically to do this “bouldering.” In the age before rock gyms, places like these were a kid's only introduction.

My parents loved that I loved the mountains. The outdoors and fitness had always been the Samet way.

Like any child, I absorbed their ethos. I had miniature dumbbells and would join my father lifting weights in our rec room. I had a fixed, daily regimen of sit-ups and push-ups that began in third grade and ran through my early twenties; I even did them religiously at music camp, where the other kids made fun of me. In summer I'd wake up early to run around our neighborhood, jogging atop soft, desert-hot asphalt in a withershins square. We didn't own a Walkman, so I'd take the black transistor radio from my parents' bathroom, throw it in a day pack, and trot along with the antenna sticking up through the zipper. I kept the band dialed to FM 94 Rock. I'm sure anyone who saw a goofy kid hustle by in the white-hot morning, Bad Company piping tinnily from his pack, had to laugh at the spectacle. One lap around was a mile and change, but the goal was two. I'd come home drenched in sweat, weigh myself, sneak spoonfuls of ice cream from the carton, and then launch into the “ups” and weights while I watched
The Price Is Right
. On runs with my father, he would push me to go faster, timing us, numbering our laps around Altura Park, my little lungs burning. When we entered a 10K in Santa Fe, I tried so hard that I shat myself at the finish line.

We all three of us pushed ourselves to perform to sport. My father was hardcore into distance running from 1973 through 1976, until all those pavement miles in the era's crude footwear finally sidelined him with plantar fasciitis. In his first marathon, in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1975, Jon Samet went all-out from the start only to tank at mile sixteen; he finished nonetheless, hobbling across the finish line with severe leg cramps (and possible stress fractures in his feet) and experiencing discomfort walking for months. And my mother went hard
all
the time because she'd become a competitive, ranking marathoner. Kathleen Samet won the woman's division at Albuquerque's Duke City Marathon in 1978 and 1979,
4
and placed second in two Arizona marathons (Tucson and Phoenix) in 1979/80, winning her a listing as a world-class marathoner in
Runner's World
magazine and a seeded place at the 1980 Boston Marathon. That year at Boston—the year Rosie Ruiz snuck into the fray a half-mile from the finish and sprinted to the tape to claim “victory”—my mother placed fifth in 2:41:50, her best race time and her final marathon ever, due to subsequent injury.
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She would also, through immersion in competitive running, further an eating disorder, a loose thread that helped to unravel my parents' marriage.

My mother is a petite five-four, and during her peak years as a runner (1979–1981) maintained her weight close to an amenorrheic hundred pounds. In photos of her breaking the tape at the Duke City Marathon, she looks like a stick-person, her skin dark brown from the desert sun. She's shown me childhood pictures of her, and while a little pudgy, my mom, the first of five children in an Irish-Catholic family, was never fat. Yet her mother—my grandmother, Patricia—criticized her weight. During my mother's preteen years, Patricia would stand Kathleen in front of a mirror and point out her size, saying, “You'll never have a boyfriend if you don't lose weight.” She also controlled my mother's portions at meals, for example, denying her seconds on rolls. It was a point of pride with Patricia that despite having five children, she always weighed an aristocratically svelte 115 pounds—never mind that she stayed thin mostly via cigarettes and by replacing food with the alcohol that eventually caused cirrhosis of her liver, killing her in her sixties. Patricia's husband, Tom, a general practitioner, was little better. The final time I saw him, in Albuquerque when I was fifteen (and five-seven and 145 pounds of muscle), he called me “doughboy” and pinched my stomach. My father was a portly child as well, and still jokes (with some pain) about clothes shopping in the “Husky Boys” section at the department store. He had a doting Jewish mother who ensured that milk and fresh chocolate-chip cookies awaited him each day after elementary school. My father lost the weight at boarding school, but has always been very body conscious. I imagine that he and my mother, in their marriage, reflected these traits off each other even as they passed them on to me.

The fighting—angry murmurings and raised voices behind a closed bedroom door—began in 1980. My parents separated in July 1981, and my mother moved into a two-bedroom apartment a few miles west—Aspen Plaza, a generic triple-decker complex behind a Safeway. On paper, as part of a shared-custody agreement, I was to spend two days a week with her, but it didn't always work out that way. My mom was often sidelined with bulimarexia, an eating disorder in which you binge-eat without purging, and depression. (Bulimarexics expunge the calories through starvation and exercise, instead of via vomiting and laxatives as bulimics do. My mother used running, biking, and swimming to stay thin.) Learning that she wasn't “feeling well,” I'd happily stay put at my father's. I had no great love for Aspen Plaza; it was a nowhere place adjacent to a bay of supermarket loading docks. It was limbo, a place where the security light outside my bedroom changed from white to orange to black then back to white again, an ever-rising sun that made it impossible to sleep. It was purgatory, a place where I'd stay up queasy and plagued by insomnia, knowing something was wrong with my mother one room over but lacking the words for it. It was hell, a place where we'd coated my walls and ceiling in phosphorescent stickers of stars, moons, planets, and comets to create a false firmament that somehow claimed the generic bedroom as “mine.” That, like the slick, itchy, Kmart comforter decorated with race cars that covered my bed, and the slippery motel-grade pillow in a cotton case similarly patterned, somehow made of this cell a little boy's room. I'd watch the sticker-stars emerge during those precious fifteen seconds when the light extinguished, only to see them disappear as its glare poured back in. My mother often sent me to the Safeway to pick up binge fodder: tiny jars of Gerber baby food, blocks of cheese, Oreos, ice cream. At night, I'd go to the window and look out at that damnable store, at the high-stacked milk crates and pallets, at the cars in the lot—metal chameleons changing colors with the light. I couldn't wait to leave. Her first Christmas there, my mom gave me roller skates, and I puttered around in the store's vacant front lot as far from her as possible until my dad drove up to collect me and my duffel bag of presents.

We were in the pool the following summer, my mother and I, horsing around on an inflatable raft. Her eating had caused her to put on weight.

“You look like a jellybean, Mom,” I said, before I could stop myself. In lieu of a swimsuit, she wore a yellow one-piece terry-cloth jumpsuit with short pants. “A big yellow jelly bean.”

“I do?”

“Yes, you do a bit!”

“Well, that's not a very nice thing to say,” she said. “Do you mean that I'm fat?”

“No. You're not fat, Mom, but you have a big, round yellow belly like a jellybean.” I laughed at my joke. It seemed harmless enough.

My mother frowned and went to lie in a deck chair, leaving me bobbing on the raft. I'd finally found the words, it seems: I'd named her disease. I'd had enough of the missions to the store, of the giant bowls of ice cream, cookies, and crème de menthe my mother tore into once a week and that had been the focus of my father's running commentary before they split. (“Someone's having an ice-cream pig-out,” he'd say. “Get the big spoon.”) Of how her love-hate relationship with food took primacy over being a mother; of how she spent so much time training with her runner friends, so many of them likewise afflicted. Of watching her stand before the refrigerator, spooning baby food into her mouth like a starving raccoon. Of how, as she and my father separated, the bulimarexia, overtraining, and emotional havoc wreaked by their dissolving union pushed her into ever blacker straits. Of weekends when she was too “sick” for me to visit, even though I didn't want to anyway. Of how powerless I was to fix any of this. Of how my mom came to do more overeating than running and had developed a strange, swollen belly that didn't match her twiggy runner's limbs. And of how this downward spiral drove her thrice, between 1981 and 1982, to attempt suicide.

Had I known just how hard it was for her, and had I known what lay in store for me, I'm sure I would have been much more sympathetic.

On the evening of my mother's disappearance, I sat with my father in the long, boxcar-shaped living room of our home on Arizona Street, in the middle of town near the state fairgrounds. Behind us, a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows bracketed an interior patio giving onto a redbrick porch. At night the glass reflected the room, only blacker, more diffuse, an opaque screen revealing nothing. We kept a three-setting standing lamp beside the couch, and this night it was dimmed to a golden glow that pooled in the glass. Post-separation, my father had grown a beard shot through with white. There was something he wasn't telling me. He would say only that it was important we find my mother. He held my hand as he said this, and I could see that the world had broken in some new and unknowable way.

“Why?” I asked him. “Where has she gone?”

“We don't know, Matthew,” he said. “But we're trying to find her.”

Two family friends had called with the news that she was missing. She'd not shown up for dinner at their house and wasn't answering her phone or her door. My mother—I would later learn—checked into a Motel 6 that evening and took an overdose of tricyclic antidepressants. The first time she'd tried—Christmas of 1981, just two months earlier—she'd taken an overdose of barbiturates at her apartment, woke up the next morning, called her psychiatrist, and was admitted to a hospital. This second time was much the same, my mother has told me—she knew more or less what a lethal dose was but “skirted it just by a bit.” Both times, some part of her wanted to live. Again she called her psychiatrist and had herself admitted—the second of four hospitalizations between December 1981 and early 1983. The third time that my mother contemplated taking her life, she drove out to the national forest above Santa Fe with intentions to wander off and die of exposure, but then thought better of it and returned to Albuquerque—and the hospital. In November 1982, the fourth and final time she was admitted, it was to prevent suicide, as my mom had felt herself becoming extremely depressed again. She finally left the ward against medical advice, breaking with her psychiatrist, who refused to discharge her even though she felt ready to return home.

That period is a fog, but I do recall going to visit my mother in whichever hospital she was in. Once, my father and I visited her at some drab, fenced-in ratbox along the interstate. We visited the ward once or twice, my father and I. The hospital had a basketball court where it backed to the freeway, and he and my mother and I went out and played horse, a bloodless facsimile of the games once played in our backyard. I could barely lift my arms to take the shots. The ward breathed inanition, a close, sicklit space full of society's castoffs. One old woman paced the halls with a pushbroom, sweeping the linoleum, the only action that calmed her sclerotic brain. My dad and I sat on plastic chairs in the hall talking to my mother, but when orderlies took the woman's broom away she began to shriek so loudly you couldn't hear yourself talk. It was time to leave. When my father and I would drive by on the highway and I'd see the netless basketball hoop sticking up over the fence, I'd think of my poor mother locked up inside and wonder how she was doing.