Swallow the Ocean (16 page)

Chapter Sixteen

AS PART OF the preparation for the custody case, each of us had to go talk to a psychiatrist. My father picked me up from school and drove me over. I went into the dark office by myself. I sat in a deep leather chair. Dr. Silverman sat behind a huge desk in the dim mahogany of that room. He had a neatly trimmed, dark beard, like every stereotype of a psychiatrist—only I had no stereotype; he was the first psychiatrist I’d ever seen.

“What’s your mother like?” he asked once I settled in.

I gazed at him. I wanted to say she’s a paranoid schizophrenic. But I hesitated. I wanted to be clear this time. Not make the same mistake I’d made with Mr. Judson. But I also sensed I wasn’t supposed to use those words first.

“She’s sick,” I said.

“In what way?”

I considered again just coming out with it—using the words that had become familiar to me through long conversations with my father. To be on the safe side I dumbed it down a little.

“She doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s not real,” I said.

Dr. Silverman’s eyebrows went way up. “What makes you say that?”

“She talks to herself. To people who aren’t there. And she fights with devils in her head.”

“She’s told you this?”

“Yeah.”

In the end, I told him everything I could think of to damn my mother. In the dark of that office, from the depths of that huge chair, the words flowed out of me. I told him about the house, how very, very messy it was. I told him that my mother got angry, that she threw things, broke things, burned things. I told him we had to live with my father and that he shouldn’t listen to Amy if she said she wanted to live with my mother. She was scared and too little to understand. She had to come to my father’s too; she couldn’t stay there by herself.

He took notes on everything I said, his eyebrows rising and falling as I spoke. I could tell that I had his attention. I only saw him that once. I don’t remember what he said to me, if he reassured me or tried to comfort me; all I remember is being sure he knew what I was talking about.

After the notebook was gone, I stopped writing. I put everything I had into the games we played and the stories I told Amy at night when neither of us could sleep. Shadow puppets on the wall in the dark, a teddy bear with a golden heart that was stolen by thieves, an underwater world discovered by the Little Women—the details of the stories came to me in shards, but even now they retain the glittering power of a talisman. I’d lost my older sister, it’s true, but together Amy and I created a nearly seamless world of imagination that carried us.

“Maybe we find a bottle in a cave,” I said.

“Why?”

“To put a note in.”

Amy looked at me hopefully. “Maybe a boat can come find us and take us to Europe?”

It was evening, almost dark; we were home alone. My mother was out. She’d left hours ago and hadn’t come back. It was hard to say anymore which was worse—her presence or her absence.

“No,” I said. “A turtle will come and take us underwater.” I picked up a yellow and green stuffed turtle that I’d won at a coin toss at school.

“Underwater?”

“Yeah.”

“Why underwater?”

“It’s magic.”

Amy picked up a small plastic brush and started to comb Meg’s hair, looping it into a ponytail.

“I wanna go to Europe.”

“Well, we’re not.”

“It’s not fair,” Amy said, her words rising on a tide of anger. “You get to decide everything.”

I looked at her hard. This sent her over the top. She grabbed the turtle from me and threw it across the room. It landed near the end of the bed, knocking over a glass of orange juice that had been sitting there for two days.

“Fine then,” I said, getting up, ignoring the juice, “be a baby.”

She lunged for me as I rose. I caught her hands before the blows landed. I held her wrists tightly up in the air. “Calm down,” I said, slowly, looking her in the eye. “Control yourself.” She fell away from me in tears, and I left her.

I went out to the living room and looked for my book. I found it pressed open at the spine, on the arm of the green couch. I was reading
The Diary of Anne Frank
. I settled into the corner of the couch, took off my glasses, and rubbed the place where they left their mark. I wasn’t used to them yet.

I had to bring the book right up to my face to read without my glasses. But I preferred it this way. The glasses made the letters crisp and tight, the words small, and somehow less potent. I liked to crawl in—take it straight, unmediated by glass.

Amy came into the living room. I didn’t look at her. She sat in the big wing chair by the window and watched for my mother. She didn’t talk to me, but I felt her remorse, and it tugged at me.

Outside I heard the sound of plastic trundling over pavement. The kids were racing big wheels down the hill in front of our house.

I looked out the window. I couldn’t quite see the street. The bottom half of the window next to me was covered with cardboard. There were now five broken windows in the house: this one, two in the dining room, one in my mother’s bedroom, and the one over the sink in the kitchen. Each time she broke a window she cut out a piece of cardboard and attached it with masking tape over the broken pane. The acacia tree in the front yard, which hadn’t been trimmed since my father left three years ago, blocked the other windows facing the street. It was shady in there all the time.

I heard Steven yell—“On your marks, get set, go.” He must have been standing at the bottom of the hill, with a bandana for a flag in his hand, holding traffic at the bottom of West Clay Park until the racers were down. Last summer, Sara had been the flag-holder because she was the oldest. That was last summer, when I liked Steven. Now I hated him.

“What are you reading?” Amy asked.

“Anne Frank.”

“Who’s she?”

“She’s a Jewish girl who got killed by the Nazis.”

“Oh.”

Since Steven had tried to break in the back door, I didn’t play outside anymore. Besides, if they asked me where Sara was, what would I say?

“When’s Mom gonna be home?” Amy asked.

I looked over at her, softening now. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Will you play dolls with me?”

“Later.”

“Please.”

“I’m reading.”

“We’ll go underwater. With the turtle.”

I sighed. “OK, when I finish this chapter.” Though of course she had no way of knowing when I finished a chapter. She was in a special reading group in school. Her class had a green group, a red group, a blue group, and a yellow group, and then “Sam, Tram, and Amy.” Sam was trouble. Tram was Vietnamese; he’d just arrived and he couldn’t really speak English yet. And Amy was Amy. I was surprised she couldn’t read. In nursery school she’d known the names of all seven continents, when she was only four. But then she was a sleepy kindergartner. Now she was in second grade and still hadn’t quite woken up. She stayed home with my mother as often as she went to school. That was part of the problem. In any case, her wits were engaged elsewhere. She had an uncanny way of staying out of trouble with my mother. Her strategy was to stay small. She was cagey and innocent all at once. Then again, she was small. She was only seven years old.

Amy brought the dolls out to the living room. She lined them up on the sofa to wait. She brushed Meg’s hair again and again with the little plastic brush. Poor doll, her nylon hair was stretched thin.

I finished the chapter—but couldn’t put down the book. I peeked ahead. I checked the dates—June 1943. She only had to make it one more year. I knew how it was going to come out, but I still couldn’t help hoping, and counting the days.

“One more page,” I said before Amy could complain.

“How many words?” She tried to lean over my shoulder to look at the book. I turned the book away from her.

“I don’t know.”

Amy started to hum a Johnny Cash song. I pulled my eyes loose from the book to smile at her. When she got to the part the radio station bleeped over, I blurted out with her, “I’m the son of a bitch who named you Sue!” The sound of our voices in the empty house made us both feel better. I put the book down on the arm of the sofa, and we gathered up the dolls to take back to our room. We crawled under my bed and picked up where we left off.

“Jo’s down by the water trying to catch fish.”

“Amy’s with her?”

“OK, yeah, Amy’s there too. And the turtle comes ’cause he got the note.”

I laid Jo across the back of the stuffed turtle. I stretched her arms around the turtle’s neck.

“At the very bottom she can breathe.”

“So what’s this doll game you and Amy are playing?” my father asked me one weekend. It was now a well-established habit that on Sunday afternoons as the hour of our return to my mother’s drew near, he and I would sit in the front room for a talk.

I was startled by his question. “It’s a game we play sometimes.”

“Your sister seems pretty caught up in it.” The night before Amy had spent an hour telling Jeni about our game. Amy’s complete absorption in the undersea world had raised an alarm.

I shrugged. “It’s just a game.”

“How often do you guys play?”

“I don’t know. Most days.” In fact, we played every day from the time we got home from school to the time we went to bed.

“Why don’t you take your sister outside to play sometimes?

“Mom doesn’t want us to go outside.” This was not really true. She didn’t track us all that carefully anymore. But it silenced him.

Later that day, as he dropped us off at my mother’s, he leaned across the seat to kiss me good-bye and said, “Why don’t you guys lay off the doll game for a while. Play some other games. OK?”

“OK,” I said, pulling my backpack over my shoulder.

Amy and I ran quickly up the stairs. When we got halfway up, where my father could not see us, I squeezed Amy’s arm. “Why did you tell Jeni about our game?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t do it again,” I said.

“OK.”

“It’s not their business.” I held her eyes a moment, still squeezing. “I mean it.”

“OK, OK. I promise,” she said, shaking her arm loose from me.

Chapter Seventeen

MY MEMORIES of the last couple of months with my mother are frayed. So much so I feel compelled to fact-check with my sisters.

The showers in both bathrooms in our apartment broke. My mother was not about to let a plumber in the house, so we bathed in a vacant apartment upstairs (one my mother neglected to rent out). Amy and I had to creep up the back stairs of the apartment building in our nightgowns to take showers before bed. My mother moved a portable TV up there, placed it on the floor of the empty living room, and began to watch the nightly news, followed by the Lawrence Welk show (I didn’t think that little girl in the chorus looked like me, but we still had to watch it).

Perhaps we spent time in that empty apartment because even my mother was overwhelmed by the devastation of our place. Amy vouches for all this, though somehow in her memory it isn’t as bad as in mine. She liked having the clean apartment to run around in, and it never occurred to her to worry what the neighbors thought.

My mother still liked to go to country music concerts but didn’t want to leave Amy and me home alone at night. So instead she left us in the car in the parking lot while she was inside. She’d get us a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken (McDonald’s was bad; the Colonel was all right), and we’d play dolls stretched out in the way back of the station wagon—a street light overhead the only light in the vast parking lot of the Cow Palace or the Concord Pavilion. Amy recalls those nights as well. Though again, she thought it was kind of fun camping out like this.

My mother, who had had no previous interest in sports, took us to a few basketball games that season. The Golden State Warriors made it to the playoffs and eventually won the NBA championship. We listened to all the games on the radio. Amy has fond memories of those games as well. I might have enjoyed them too if my mother’s intensity about the players and the outcomes of games hadn’t had an unnatural feel to it.

She cooked for us at night sometimes—spaghetti, pork chops in the electric grill, or just tomato soup from the can with a piece of cheese melted on the bottom of the bowl. More and more Amy and I foraged for our own meals: toast with peanut butter and jelly, yogurt with fruit on the bottom, and bowl after bowl of cereal.

The kitchen, though, was treacherous. A minefield of rot. Milk went sour in its carton in the fridge, bread molded on the counter, fruit rotted in the bowl, vegetables turned furry and soft in the crisper, and hard-boiled eggs turned sulfurous and evil in the shell.

My mother still made bag lunches for us for school, though the contents were thoroughly untradable—peanut butter and Miracle Whip sandwiches, little boxes of raisins, fruit if we were lucky. When there was nothing decent to put in a lunch bag, she’d give us fifty cents for the cafeteria.

Amy and I didn’t have too many “parties,” the junk food feasts from the corner store. Money was harder to come by without Sara, who’d always had cash from babysitting. The couches and change bowls were tapped out. And anyway it was way too scary without Sara.

My mother started sleeping in the living room—to keep an eye on the fires that smoldered in the fireplace all night, I suppose. I have a very clear memory of finding her in the mornings with sheets of aluminum wrapped around her body under the covers. She still liked me to come get in bed with her on the mattress in the living room before I got ready for school, an experience that now set my teeth on edge. I never asked about the foil, and she didn’t explain. I thought vaguely that it was some kind of beauty treatment. Mostly I tried not to think about it at all. Neither of my sisters will vouch for this one.

When I run it by Sara, she looks at me strangely. “I don’t remember that,” she says.

“It must have been after you left. When she started sleeping in the living room,” I say.

“She slept in the living room?”

“Yeah. She dragged her mattress out there on the floor in front of the fireplace. You don’t remember that?”

“I remember the fires.” Sara rolls her eyes at me.

I nod, still stuck on the tinfoil. “I’d come out in the morning, and there’d be big sheets of aluminum foil next to the bed. She wrapped them around herself, around her legs and arms when she slept.”

Sara is looking at me intently now, but a space has opened between us—as if I’m describing the events of a childhood she had no part of.

“Really?” she asks doubtfully.

“Yeah,” I say, sticking to my guns. “Every morning towards the end there. I thought it was some kind of beauty treatment. Maybe to lose weight?”

Sara nods, looking at me steadily.

“Now I think it was more of a protection from outside forces thing. X-rays or voices or something.”

“Like the people who put tinfoil inside their hats?” Sara asks.

“Yeah,” I say, and then relate a story I heard recently about someone whose mentally ill mother used to cover all the windows in their house with tinfoil.

“Why always tinfoil?” Sara asks.

“I don’t know,” I shrug. “Maybe it works?”

Things were considerably more cheerful at my Dad’s house. He and Jeni had moved in together in a larger flat. They remodeled the basement to make a large bedroom for my sisters and me. When it was done, it was the tidiest place you ever saw—all white walls and module units, built-in shelves and beds with drawers tucked underneath. Jeni bought brightly colored Marieko sheets and spreads for our beds. We all assumed it was just a matter of time before we moved in.

School was also a blessed respite. Though I was still absent a great deal, I always did well, and remarkably, neither my teachers nor my friends seemed to catch on to my troubles at home. Except for the gauntlet of open houses and parent-teacher conferences, my school life was completely cut off from my home life.

Each month I ordered a stack of books through the mail-order club at school. My mother let me get whatever I wanted, and she always wrote the checks. When the books arrived, and I had a dozen or so new paperbacks to lug home, I felt a deep sense of safety. I’d shuffle through the covers, read all the blurbs, and very carefully choose the first one to read. Then I’d pile them at the foot of my bed, my reserves, reassuring me in the morning and again at night before I went to bed.

I did a book report for school on
The Endless Steppe
, a bitter story about a Russian girl sent to Siberia with her family. They endured hard work and cold winters, which killed her father, but in the end she and her mother escaped to America. The book club had lots of books like that—little girls in dire straights. I liked stories with magic better, but these were good in a pinch.

Our assignment was to make a cover for the book. Writing the jacket copy was easy, but I agonized over the artwork. Drawing was not a possibility—I had no illusions about my artistic abilities. The solution came to me in a flash. I cut out a sun, and colored it bright orange and yellow. I pasted it to a solid white sheet of construction paper. I drew a thin waving line across the paper to show the Siberian horizon, just enough to differentiate the white of the ground from the white of the sky. In the foreground I drew a small stick figure of a girl, almost lost in the snow. Then, and this was the genius of it, I got wax paper from the kitchen and taped a piece over the entire scene. Perfect. The girl was misty now. The sun was still there, but muted and bleak behind the wax paper. I’d captured just the desolation I was shooting for.

Sometime during that year the school bus drivers went on strike. Amy walked to school, so the strike didn’t affect her. My school was a fifteen-minute drive away, so I had to take the public bus or get a ride to and from school every day for several weeks. My mother and Lisa’s mother arranged to carpool. Lisa’s mom took us in the morning before she went to work. My mother picked us up in the afternoon. It did not go well. My mother was invariably late, which was excruciating—I was used to my mother’s lateness; Lisa wasn’t. In her world, mothers picked up their children on time. Each day as the schoolyard emptied and I willed the station wagon to appear, I was filled with shame.

My mother’s strangeness was an unbroached topic between Lisa and me. We’d been best friends for three years, and though I spent nearly every school day afternoon at her house, she’d never been inside mine. She was smart enough to know something was up. Then again, my mother somehow still came off as normal enough for Lisa’s mother to carpool with her.

One afternoon we waited over an hour, but my mother did not show. We searched our pockets for money. Lisa found a dime, so I called home from a pay phone. There was no answer.

Lisa’s mom wasn’t due home from work for hours, we didn’t have enough change between us for the bus, and it was getting late. Though it seemed unimaginably far, we decided to walk home. We stuck to Geary Boulevard, figuring if my mother drove by, she’d see us. We counted every block. There were fifty-two in all.

We had a lot of time to talk, and somehow the rhythm of the walking loosened my tongue. I don’t know what unleashed it, but once I started I couldn’t stop. I told Lisa about my mother. About the voices, and the devils, about thinking she was in touch with JFK, and the homemade clothes to protect us. I explained that schizophrenia was an illness, that my mother was paranoid. Lisa feared and disliked my mother, and she was angry about being left at school. I finally told Lisa what was going on partly to defend my mother––to let Lisa see that my mother was sick, not bad.

Lisa listened. She was only ten years old. It must have been quite an earful. But she didn’t judge, and she didn’t seem shocked. At least she didn’t show it. We linked arms at the elbow and walked the rest of the way in tandem.

We parted ways at 24th Avenue. I turned to go home, she still had to go two blocks up to 26th. My feet hurt from the hard concrete, and I was worried my mother might be mad at me for not waiting for her at school. But I felt light as I walked, lighter than I’d felt in a very long time.

When school ended for the year, Lisa went to Boston to stay with her grandparents for six weeks. Sara was with my father, and we saw her only on weekends. I didn’t want to play outside with the neighborhood kids. So mostly I was stuck inside. The summer was interminable. I wrote long letters to Lisa. I read—
The Hobbit, To Kill a Mockingbird
, Nancy Drew mysteries—anything I could get my hands on. And Amy and I played dolls. Despite my father’s admonishment, we were even more deeply engrossed.

The Little Women lived underwater now. To keep their feet on the floor of the ocean, to weigh themselves down so they wouldn’t float up, they filled the hems of their long skirts with sand. A whole world that nobody knew about flourished down there: castles in the coral reefs, sea glass for money, snails for breakfast, an evil dwarf, an enchanted kelp forest, and seahorses to catch and tame and ride.

There came a day that summer when once again I was seated on the floor of the living room with my mother, at the foot of the dark green couches, the spot where my sisters and I had once staked our claim on the prairie. The custody suit was to be heard soon, soon, any day now, but not yet. I’d come this far clinging to the prisoner’s hatch-on-the-wall faith that what can be measured can be endured. Counting, always counting— three days to the weekend, two weeks ’til we go to the beach, a month until school starts, ten cars and my father will be here. I’d nearly worn myself out counting, and still the closer we got to the final day in court, the more the time before me seemed to expand.

My mother and I were talking about Hiroshima. Already the names Hiroshima and Nagasaki filled me with sadness. In school we’d made colored cranes from origami paper to send to Hiroshima. But the things my mother told me were new: a bright and blinding light, burns on the bodies, bones without skin, the illnesses and more death that followed. I cannot remember precisely how the conversation went, only that eventually it turned to the possibility of this happening in San Francisco. The Russians, I suppose. My mother said if it came to it, it would be better to die than to survive. If the bomb was to fall here, if we knew it was coming, the best thing to do would be to kill ourselves. We wouldn’t have much time.

She trained her clear blue eyes at me and asked, “If something like that happened and I told you to kill yourself, you would, wouldn’t you?”

The breath between my lips wavered. I felt the wire that ran between us go tight. Was she talking about a real nuclear attack or some apocalypse only she was expecting? What was the difference? How would I know? A shiver of terror rose in me. I did not want to pledge my life to her.

She waited.

I nodded my head, forced out the words. “If you told me to, I would.”