Swallow the Ocean (20 page)

“When do you want to meet?” she asked. Her words had a clipped, rushed quality.

“Next Monday?” I offered.

“OK,” she said. “We’ll meet at the St. Francis?”

“Yes,” I answered, though this went without saying. For twelve years we’d been meeting in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square.

“How’re you doing?” I asked, trying to hold her another minute.

“Fine, just fine,” she said, moving away from me.

“Do you want to get a cup of coffee or something?” I said, motioning back towards the Starbucks.

“No, I’m fine. See you next week,” she said, fluttering a pale, curled hand at me, and she was gone.

There’s an emotional numbing, a kind of dulling down, they say, after years of schizophrenia. Typically delusions, hallucinations, and agitated behavior decrease with age, almost as if the disease burns itself out over time. What remains is ghostly. The psychiatric terms are chilling and, in this case, accurate:
catatonic mannerisms, flattening of affect, robot-like fixity,
petrification of attitude and reactions, poverty of ideas, passivity, a
narrow range of modes of behavior
.

A popular misconception is that the flatness results from years spent in institutions or on medication. But my mother’s never had the drugs. She’s part of the control group, and it’s a bigger group than you might think. Statistics on the numbers of untreated mentally ill are hard to come by, but one survey in Baltimore found that fully 50 percent of people who suffer from schizophrenia receive no medication or ongoing psychiatric care.

In the lobby of the St. Francis, Sara and I sat in high-backed armchairs and waited for my mother. Amy called in on the cell phone. She was parking. She was running late. She’d just finished law school, from which she graduated summa cum laude—a long way from the remedial reading group. She was now a public defender and very busy. But she’d be there. My niece and nephew, five and eight years old, were playing in the revolving door of the hotel. Sometimes my mother didn’t come. When she did come, she was late. Always we worried. The fact of the matter was she could die and no one would contact us. There was no point in saying this out loud. I turned to Sara and said instead, “Maybe she had other plans?” Sara looked at me, deadpan, shrugged. “Maybe she’s busy?” Then we were both laughing, in a hollow-bellied, helpless way that almost loosened the lead in our limbs.

My niece, attracted by our mirth, ran over to us. “What’re you guys laughing about?”

“Nothing, baby,” Sara said, putting an arm around Kait, whose bear cub arms wrapped around my sister’s waist.

If my mother came, we’d go across the street and eat an overpriced Italian meal. She’d stay with us for an hour and a half, maybe two, until she got restless and we knew it was time to go. She’d speak every now and then—answer a question, as long as we didn’t pry. Nothing personal, nothing about the past, nothing that explicitly acknowledged that we were her children. My mother carried on the pleasantries of conversation as if out of old habit. She talked most easily with Amy. (Because Amy was still the baby?) Occasionally, she laughed. When she was silent, my sisters and I filled in, telling each other about our lives for her benefit. (Sara and I brainstormed safe topics for conversation via cell phone on the way over.) My niece and nephew knew she was not quite right. They chatted her up anyway, telling her about dolphins and dinosaurs, about art projects at school. They’re troopers, not least of all because Sara is exactly the kind of mother my mother was when we were small.

Someone once said that having a relative with schizophrenia is like a funeral that never ends. Certainly, the woman I knew as a child is gone. Yet there is no grave, no stone, no eulogy, to mark her passing. When a parent dies, a child may be comforted by the thought that the parent’s spirit is watching over her. We kneel at gravesides to address our prayers, our grief, our anger, our words to the dead. I can’t address my mother, not in this life, nor in any other.

Of course, there are people with schizophrenia who recover and others who have good periods and bad. For some, medication makes all the difference. For my mother, I don’t even think words like
recovery, cure,
or
improvement
.

I worried over small things instead. Maybe, just maybe, we’d get her to a dentist someday to relieve the discomfort that was obvious from the careful way she chewed. Sara and Amy thought I was crazy. They focused on new glasses. “That could be done without anyone actually touching her,” Amy said. When we broached it, when we broached anything, my mother said, “No, that’s OK. I’m fine.”

After dinner, she walked us all back to the parking garage under Union Square, across from Macy’s, where we’d left our cars. Amy casually asked my mother if she needed a ride anywhere. I smiled. I knew what the answer would be, but I admired Amy for never giving up. At the entrance to the garage, we said our good-byes. My mother never said “I love you,” or “Take care of yourselves,” or any of the other endearments she’d used when we were kids. Just an awkward pat on the shoulder and “Good-bye.” Cars pushed their way in and out of busy downtown traffic on either side of us. I kissed my mother’s wilted cheek and turned to go. She stood there until we were gone—made us walk away from her—to ensure we didn’t try to follow her home, I suppose. Kait ran ahead to push the button for the elevator, and then we all waited, anxious now to get to our cars, our homes, our lives. But I knew if I looked back, I’d see my mother still standing there on the sidewalk, a shrunken figure in a long beige coat, caught in the glare of the department store windows across the street.

I never wanted to see any light in the sky or hear any rumbling from the universe. I used to tell myself that if the voices ever came, I’d shut myself up, refuse to listen. I wanted to stick to what can be seen and proved, to be sensible and skeptical like my dad. As if we can choose. It’s physical. It’s chemical. It’s beyond our control. This, if you can get your head around it, is not comforting, but it is liberating.

There’s the tragedy of my mother’s life, irredeemable. There’s the echo of this tragedy on my life. That’s my business to redeem. And there, bouncing on my sister’s lap, is my bright-eyed five-year-old niece. Such a bold and happy child. Might I have been that way? No, I don’t kid myself about this. My mother’s illness is not the only thing that shaped me. I would have been a brooder no matter what. Some things we come with. Others we are given. The world throws up its beauty, throws up its charm. I have no heart for skepticism, and no amount of brooding will change this.

I worry over big things too. I find I still believe the things my mother told me when I was small. I believe we each have a soul, precious and indestructible, and I worry over where, precisely, my mother’s soul resides.

Chapter Twenty

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I visited my father in Paris. He and his wife were living there for a few months. Knowing I was always hungry for information about my mother, he offered to take me to the hotel where they’d met more than forty years before.

As we walked through Paris, his face was grim. For my father everything that touched on my mother was weighted with dread. But as we made our way through the winding streets of the Latin Quarter, I began to understand that this was a pilgrimage. When I first arrived in Paris, my father had said, “I’ll show you the Stella on Friday.” I hadn’t thought about the date. May 10, 2002. By chance, by his design, or simply by the elegant, nagging symmetry on which the unconscious seems to insist, we made this trip on my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday. Normally her birthday was a private day of mourning for me. Perhaps because I was jet-lagged, and in Paris, I forgot to grieve until I saw the date on the morning paper.

It was a gray day. From time to time we had to pull up the hoods of our raincoats against the light rain. Normally he and I had plenty to talk about, but today we walked mostly in silence. Neither of us mentioned the date. Occasionally, I asked a question to try to draw my father out.

We walked up Rue Monsieur le Prince, a narrow street lined with bookstores and small cafés, leading to the Sorbonne. “How did things look back then?” I asked. He lifted his head and glanced around. “Pretty much like this.” I shut my eyes, and tried for a moment to conjure up the scene, movie set–style, with cars from the 1950s, women in skirts, and men in hats. “Well, how did people dress?” I tried again.

He stopped, and with a gesture of the hand to indicate the entire street before us, he said, “You saw a lot of black.” He laughed mildly. There was still a lot of black; leather jackets, black pants, the black bowling/tennis shoes with white stripes that the students were wearing. In 1960 all that black must have been striking. My father arrived from the technicolor of Southern California and landed in the most sophisticated place on earth, in the midst of the original black turtleneck moment.

Suddenly, the Stella was on our right. I backed away to take in the façade. It was pretty, though the stone front was cracked, and unlike the buildings on either side, it had not been cleaned or refaced in recent years. On the second story, white wooden shutters hung loosely in their frames. Black iron patios decked the third-story windows. A few bright red geraniums potted on those tiny decks added the only color to the building. The Stella was still a cheap place to stay on the Left Bank.

We entered through a narrow hall. Three-hundred-year-old wooden beams came up through the brick of the walls and ceiling at odd angles. There was no one in sight, so we started up the stairway into almost total darkness. The stairs were steep and uneven. The settling of the building, the wear of hundreds of years of footsteps, had carved deep wells into the surface of the wood.

My father was briefly enlivened by the task of figuring out where his room and my mother’s room had been located. Renovations had been made, tiny rooms joined to make larger rooms and bathrooms added. He went up and down the stairs trying to get his bearings. He showed me the door off the stairway, now locked, that once led to the WC he and Joe had shared with all the residents of floors one and two.

Finally, we decided his room must have been on the first floor just off the stairway where the reception area was now. Still no one had appeared, so we tested the door. My father pulled it slowly towards him. It glided open. Just as promised, the open door blocked the stairway down. My father, speaking in the church whisper we’d both adopted when we entered the hotel, said, “She kind of peeked her head around the corner.” He inclined his head slightly. “I invited her inside,” he smiled. “She came right in,” he said with a lightness I had not seen all day.

In the spring of 2004, out of the blue, my mother called my father one morning to say she was being evicted and needed help. I was halfway across the country in graduate school. By the time Sara and my father arrived, the sheriff was there. My mother was locked out of her apartment. She didn’t even have her glasses on.

After some wrangling with the manager and offers to pay all the back rent, Sara and my father realized these people were not going to relent. The manager was glad to be rid of her. After twenty-five years in that apartment, they put her out. If she hadn’t had anyone to call, or the presence of mind to find my father’s phone number, she would have joined the throngs of people with mental illness who live on the streets of San Francisco.

Within three hours Sara had settled her into a building my father owns nearby, fulfilling my father’s prophesy of nearly thirty years earlier: “You’ll end up living in one of my buildings in the Tenderloin.”

This change felt briefly better. She knew that we knew where she was. Sara bought some new things for her—towels, sheets, and blankets. The manager at the new building kept an eye on her. We’d know if anything happened. This change also made her life real to us for the first time in twenty-five years. Her refusal to allow us to know where or how she lived had relieved us of responsibility for her in some sense.

The next Christmas I was home for break and went with Sara to ask her to meet us for dinner. We knocked on the door. She took a very long time answering. She was not dressed, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. She was rail thin. She seemed confused but agreed to meet us. On Sunday, she didn’t show at the St. Francis. She’d not shown up on other occasions, but this time I was very worried. Was she sick? Could she even leave the apartment? If not, how was she eating?

I called Sara and convinced her to come with me to bring my mother groceries the next day. As we were on our way to the store, Sara called the apartment manager to make sure we could get in; coincidentally, he said, he was just about to call. My mother had knocked on his door the afternoon before and asked if there was anyone in the building she could pay to go to the store for her. She’d given him a couple of dollars for milk and bread.

Sara and I went into the grocery store, overwhelmed by our task. Could she cook? Would the food rot? What does a person need who never leaves her apartment? In the end, we bought all the same foods we’d bought when we’d done the grocery shopping when we were little—Campbell’s tomato soup, Orowheat bread, Laura Schudder’s peanut butter—choosing brands as carefully as we’d done then, the labels she favored instantly recognizable after all these years.

When we got to the apartment she looked terrible. She had a bruise on her cheek, and she couldn’t focus her eyes on us. She didn’t have her glasses on, and the light in the apartment was off. We began to wonder if she could see at all. Again she was not dressed, and looked downright emaciated.

“I’m just a little under the weather,” she said. When we began to press, to ask what else she needed, she got panicky, pushing the door shut. “I’m OK. I’ll be OK, I’ve just been a little sick, but I’m feeling better.”

Then followed a series of consultations between my sisters and me, and calls to various social service agencies. Meals-onWheels had a three-hundred-person waiting list. A city services person I reached on the phone lectured me that the first thing that needed to happen was some mental health treatment, and then when she trusted people again, other steps could be taken. I found my voice rising. “I don’t think you understand the situation.” Sara had a woman ask, “How can we help her if she won’t open the door?” They were the professionals. Weren’t they supposed to tell us what to do?

Finally, after many phone calls, we did get her on the Meals-on-Wheels circuit. A blessing beyond compare. We found an optometrist who made us a pair of glasses by guessing at her prescription. She never wore them. We could see the bedding Sara had bought the year before neatly stacked by the door, still in the package.

Sara got a sympathetic social worker to visit my mother. “When was the last time you saw a doctor?” the social worker asked my mother through the cracked door. “Mind your own business,” my mother said, pushing the door closed. I could just hear the intonation of her voice. Angry, slightly singsong. Final.

We debated, briefly, the notion of hospitalizing her. Were we allowing her to suffer? She might have cancer, might be dying, might be in great pain. We decided against it for now. Clearly she didn’t want to move, and she probably would not be able to tolerate prolonged human contact. Isolation was the route she’d chosen and one we had accepted, to some extent, all these years. We had to ask ourselves, if she’d indeed been suffering from a disease of an organic nature all along and we’d never forcibly intervened before, how could we justify hospitalizing her now when she was too weak to defend herself?

We’ve settled into a routine. One of us, usually Sara or Amy since I am only in town a couple of times a year, brings her a bag of groceries (toilet paper, soap, milk, bread, peanut butter, cereal) every week. Meals-on-Wheels brings her two meals a day. If for some reason she doesn’t answer the door, they call and we know to go check on her. She’s improved slightly, is at least not half starved as when we first intervened. Her vision seems better. But she still hasn’t left the apartment. “Would you like to take a short walk one of these times?” I ask. “I’ll think about it,” she says. I report her response to Sara, and we briefly take heart. Then it becomes a weary joke. Sara sends me up to ask: “Would you like someone to come once in a while to help clean the apartment?” She’s thinking about that too.

“You know there’s nothing keeping us outside that door,” Sara says. “We could walk right in. She can’t stop us.”

“I know.” But something does stop us.

On a recent trip home my fiancé came with me when I went to see my mother. He’s a poet. We met while I was in graduate school in Minnesota, where I now live. Mike was in California for Christmas to meet my family for the first time. He offered to come up with me to my mother’s apartment. “No, wait in the car,” I said. She was the one member of the family I was not ready for him to meet.

She took a long time answering my knock. Then she stood half hidden behind the door, looking not at me but sideways at the wall. No matter what I asked—can I take out the garbage, do you want to go for a walk, can I change the sheets—she said, “No, I’m all right.” Or “I’m OK now.” She spoke as though she were grasping at language, at the habits of speech. All she wanted was to get that door closed, for me to be gone.

Finally, running low on questions and stamina, I prepared to go. I bent over to push the grocery bags I’d brought inside. She stood there in her underwear, mostly hidden by the door. When I raised my eyes I had a very close view of her naked, shockingly thin, old woman’s leg, inches from my face—pale, nearly hairless, curving in rather than out at the thigh. The sight of it was like a blow to the plexus. She closed the door and I backed away, stunned.

The image stayed with me for days.
That is your
mother’s
leg
, I told myself each time it rose in my mind. Only I didn’t believe it. Seeing her nearly naked made me realize that over the years she’d become an abstraction to me—a cloud of pain, guilt, and despair, detached from physical reality. Her body had not existed for me since I was eleven. And no matter how hard I tried, I could not put this leg together with the body I knew a very long time ago—a body that bore mine, a body that echoes in my own. We are the same height, she and I. Or we were—she is hunched and shrunken now and seems several inches shorter. But I grew into that same build, pale white skin, with dark hair, fleshy in the thighs and hips. I tried to put myself in her place, to imagine what she thought about, what she felt, the same way I’d imagined what she thought or felt when she was twenty-three or thirty-five. I didn’t get very far. I had nothing to go on, and my brain locked down somewhere soon after trying to imagine the physical pain she might suffer. A failure of empathy? A failure of imagination? A self-preserving refusal to open myself to any more suffering? I don’t know. I just know my brain will not conjure up anything. That door is closed. Something very powerful stops me from breaching it.

Sometimes I wake in the night with a searing vision of my mother’s life. In that stark moment of waking I am unable to shield myself from the utter barrenness of the last twenty-five years. Everything that bears on her—the past, the present, and all the time in between—feels like a wild tangle of weeds, wrapped round my throat, dragging me down, holding me under. Over the years, I’ve had to fight my way to the surface over and over again. To take a knife, cut the hem, let the sand fall out, and rise to the light.

I’ve always floated. I don’t know why. This much I do know: I am buoyant. The sun comes out; I get better. The world outside me, with its joys and sorrows, sorrows far greater than this personal loss, presses upon me. I can only stay stuck in my own sadness so long. These may be the real consolations—optimism and resilience—happy traits slipped into my hand.

Sara called me shortly after that visit. I was in the car driving home.

“Hey, I wanted to tell you this before I forget,” she said. “I had kind of a long conversation with Mom the other day.”

“A long conversation?” I said doubtfully.

“Well, a few sentences back and forth.”

“What’d you talk about?” I felt a slight twinge of jealousy that Sara had managed that.

“I told her some stuff about the kids, and I told her about Mike coming out to visit for Christmas.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, she actually seemed interested. She asked me questions.”

“What did she ask?”

Sara paused for a moment, trying to remember. “She asked if he was special.”

I was stunned. “She did?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you say?”

“I said he was. Oh and then I told her he was a poet. It was kind of funny. She had the exact same reaction that everyone else has—that kind of confused
Oh
.”

I laughed, because I knew exactly the reaction she meant.

Other times I go back. I see us at the Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. The tiny cups, the shiny rice crackers, the bitter taste of jasmine tea, my feet dangling under the table. I am five. I look out from inside the teahouse at the arched wooden bridge and I suddenly have an odd feeling, akin to déjà vu, that we are inside the Willow plate pattern, the blue and white china plate pattern with the image of a wooden bridge, a teahouse, a willow tree, and a pair of doves flying overhead. My kindergarten teacher brought the plate to school and told us the story. A young girl was supposed to marry a rich man, but she fell in love with her father’s clerk instead. He sent her a message via a dove; she floated him a letter in a paper sailboat. The night before she was to marry, the lovers ran away together. Her father pursued them, and they were both killed. But the gods had pity, and the lovers were reincarnated as doves, the pair flying together over the wooden bridge in the Willow pattern.