Somebody Somewhere (10 page)

I threw image after horrifying image in Tom's face. No reaction. He didn't remember. I threw some of the images directly involving him. “That was the old man's fault,” he said, referring to my father. My mother, as far as he seemed concerned, seemed to symbolize an almost brave, flaunting rejection of accepted social norms—the tough deserted wife who had managed to bring him up on her own. The truth was that he had brought himself up.

I pushed Tom closer and closer to the edge. Images of abuse were met with his own macabre impromptu stand-up comedy. “Hey but wasn't it fun?” he joked. “I think of it as home entertainment.”

Then Tom was saying, “Look, it's okay, I'm laughing.”

I shouted at him, every sentence another picture. Tom shouted back at me, “Why do you have to do this? Why do you have to try
to make everyone remember things? You always have to make us feel.” What sort of crime was that? I wondered.

Tom got up to leave the room and paused at the door. The smile was gone from his face. A chilling realness and vulnerability was in its place, as though he had suddenly taken off a mask. Tom had been about to make his stage exit. Suddenly he stood there without his costume. “I do remember,” he said finally. “I remember everything.”

I
got a letter. I had been accepted for the course in teaching elementary school children. I had applied for it on a whim when I'd first returned to Australia and found there were no jobs to be had. Besides, the university was a social climate I already knew, and the teaching course would take only one year. I had to stay only two weeks at Tom's house before the course began. The end of that two weeks would be my open door, my escape route. I wanted to overcome my fear of closeness. I decided that if there was one safe person with which to try to learn to cope with touch, Tom was that person.

I covered myself completely with a heavy quilt and approached Tom. “Hug me,” came my muffled voice from under the cover, “but stop when I say.” Tom hugged. I trembled from head to toe and I tried to stay with my feelings.

“Stop!” I shrieked after a few seconds. Quickly I went into the other room. My body was shocked and shaking, my hearing was painfully sharp. It was one thing to deal with touch as a performance or dissociate from it all as an object of someone else's tactile infliction. It was altogether different when inner defenses had to stomach the awareness that touch was emotional, self-initiated, and personal. My senses were overloaded and I was frightened and dizzy.

There was a vague hint of gladness at having attempted to attack my own fear. It was damned hard to be touched when I had a feeling self intact. It had been so easy to dissociate.

By the end of the two weeks, I felt I couldn't stand being there anymore. Though he accepted me now as myself, I still felt Tom wished I would perform again and make him laugh. I couldn't blame him. The atmosphere there made the place feel like a room full of gray rain clouds.

Image meant a lot to Tom and even though it seemed he was reaching a new understanding of me, it was as though this threatened to call into question his own life, which he was not at all ready for. If Tom was not the image, who was he? Unlike me, perhaps his self was not lurking in the shadows, reemerging whenever he was again in isolation. Perhaps he had left his self behind so long ago he had forgotten when, where, and even who it had been.

“Get real,” I said to Tom. “Get real before it's too late.”

M
y mother was hardly around and even more rarely awake. I avoided her like the plague. Not a lot had changed in my communication with her.

I hadn't lived with her for more than ten years. For three of those years I had heard from her only a few times a year, when she managed to track down my latest change of address. I had called her sometimes the year before from the United Kingdom. Somewhere locked within her mind I was sure she had some memory of an opinion or a label that would help me find why I was neither stupid nor crazy and yet still not “normal.” I had called again and again and again, pleading to know, in a way that would make some sense, why I was like I was. This person was giving me no answers now. If she had them she would die with them. Perhaps the answers had already died along with a memory that couldn't battle almost three decades of swimming marathons.

Before, I had answered her in Italian. Now it was German, which she did not understand. When she insisted on an intelligible response I answered her like a mechanical answering machine giving out one,
two, or three word answers. She met my questions with fury, obscenity, ridicule, and even more confusion.

“You're from outer space,” she said. “You're not from this planet.” She told me I'd learned to be how I was from all the time I'd spent with my father's mother, who was thought to be “deaf” and “dotty” and “not all there.”

My father's mother was a private family joke. She was spoken of as though she were somehow not as good as other people. The similarities between me and my grandmother were used as an attack upon my father's worth, a way of reminding him that my problems came from
his
side of the family.

It was true that my grandmother was like me and also had blood sugar problems. It seemed my mother had a grab bag of theories about my condition, any of which would do as long as none of them pointed toward her. When she wasn't denying my difficulties in total, my mother was as guilty of passing the buck as those who'd passed it to her. Everything from lead poisoning to the mercury in my amalgam fillings to my being the reincarnation of a tormented soul had been used to account for why I was like I was. According to the reincarnation theory, I had not lived the life I remembered, I was remembering the life of someone else who had possessed my body. Nothing I remembered about myself or anyone else was true (a very handy theory given the nature of my family), and my mother had certainly never laid a hand upon me in her life. My father gave me a speech on the effects of alcohol on the brain and why it was sometimes pointless to argue or ask any more questions.

I stood before this person who was my biological mother and tried to see who she was. I was looking at a jigsaw puzzle for which many pieces had been lost and some others were just put back together any old way. I knew her in glimpses, just as she knew me in glimpses.

The regrets I had were not regrets that she was my mother. They were regrets about just how far ignorance can go with others turning away. What's gone wrong when a fourteen-year-old is already drinking and even encouraged to drink from the age of three? What's gone wrong when a teenager thinks that being the sex toy of a man who
drives a big car means she is special? What's gone wrong when a pregnant nineteen-year-old still thinks you get pregnant from kissing? What's gone wrong when this human being thinks of domestic violence as a normal part of a relationship? What's gone wrong when a woman goes for help and comes out year after year after year with bottle upon bottle of pills? Where were all the high-flying, save-the-world martyrs? Where were the moralizers and those who talk of human rights? Where were all those who would talk so easily of the rottenness of my mother?

I stood before a brutal woman and a crumbled one. One does not know how sad “the world” really is until one sees it kill one of its own. Chewed up and spat out, what now stood before me was a human shipwreck.

Yet this was the same woman who once brought me potted plants every few months for a year. The woman who brought home fabric remnants for me to cut up, sew together, or do with as I would. The woman who told me the names of all the different garden plants whether I appeared to listen or not. The woman who brought home dolls and wished her daughter would play with them as she would have, had she had them as a child, the same woman who thought if she could make me dance I would be all she ever wanted for herself but never got.

I stood listening to the woman who was never given a chance by me just as she seemed not to give one to herself. I asked myself who my father would have become in the same circumstances, whether in her place he would have been my “monster” instead of my mother. I asked myself what this does to a person day in, day out, to be treated as a contamination, an invader, and an outsider. I thought of what it might have been like for my mother in her social isolation, to look forward to someone bringing the world home after work each night but being greeted by a husband with little more than more of the same she got from me or the same patronizing, charitable efforts upon which I came to choke in later life.

I left without a thank you or a chat, a goodbye or forwarding address. As always I treated my mother as though my present and future were none of her business.