The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (21 page)

There is a knock at the door. Hannah pokes her head in. She is in striped leggings and 3-D glasses, with her hair in a high, comedy ponytail, hovering with the Kindle. It’s the matter of a two-dollar Kindle purchase. My eleven-year-old has slept in her bra. Her clothes are in a volcano on her dresser. She watercolors on her walls. The window won’t close, so there are spiderwebs. If you look into her room, you would say she has no mother or no mother takes care of her.

I have nothing to offer her. All I say is: “Honey, come lie down next to me.”

She obeys, and I wrap my arms around her and bury my head in her neck. This is all I can do. I feel her weight. Then I start to cry.

“Uh-huh,” she murmurs, stroking my hair. “I understand, Mommy.”

What’s curious is that I detect very little anxiety coming off her. In fact there is a sort of calm. Not just a calm, a sense of quiet theatrical importance around our moment together. Having been invited back into her mother’s bed, where she dwelled on and off until the age of six, Hannah has a renewed sense of real estate. There is something deft about her hair stroking. It is not unlike the motion of brushing the hair of a Barbie or a stuffed unicorn. Poor baby. So confident. So clueless. What story can I tell her? “Honey,” I say, “when I was a kid, my mommy had moods and she would literally disappear for three days, lying in bed, curtains drawn. And
nooo
body could get in. Nobody. Mommies had those kinds of moods back then. Very big stuff. Like when she—”

“Threw the glass Pyrex dish on her birthday,” Hannah recites immediately.

I’m surprised. “I told you that?”

Hannah rolls her eyes. “About fourteen times! And about the butcher and her tennis skirts and the big amber jewelry . . .” Hannah rattles off my mother’s story, and I am amazed at the fact that we’re so close, we talk so much, and the boundaries are so invisible my daughter seems to know all my thoughts and memories, even the ones I forgot I told her.

But I know there are some things I haven’t told her. After my mother hurled the Pyrex dish against the wall and disappeared into her bedroom like that tide washing out—door locked, curtains drawn, the thick silence—well, that was only the first time. What we didn’t know then was that the highs would start waning, and what would eventually be the new normal was a fearsome long-term depression. The culmination was early Alzheimer’s at fifty-nine and her death at sixty-nine. The last four years of her decline were so painful I didn’t visit her in that horrible convalescent home, not once.

That’s one gothic horror tale I don’t have the heart to tell my daughter in this moment . . . but here is another. All these decades later, it is perhaps even more to the point.

Which is to say, my general experience with my mom was that even when that bedroom door closed and the silence fell, my mom was gettable, always eventually gettable. This was because I, her youngest, had learned a trick. I had learned how to break the spell.

Let us say we had all been planning to go to a fun neighbor’s barbecue, of the sort my gregarious mother loved, but suddenly, an hour beforehand, my mother had shut down and taken to her bed. All you needed to do was take a deep breath, wedge yourself in, and sit—almost nonchalantly—on the edge of her bed, declaring, “Well, Mommy, if you are not going to the neighbor’s barbecue, I’m not going either.”

“What?” she’d say wanly.

Drop the head: “I’m too shy to go by myself.”

And indeed, after a certain amount of pathetic-speak, the foam would form in the distance, the gurgling would begin, and the great tsunami of my mother would rise. She would get up and go to her closet and start coordinating an outfit, saying, “Let’s show them. Let’s show them, you and I. Who do they think they are? We’re
doing
it—I
insist
—we are
going
to that barbecue!”

But once I became a teen, the age Hannah is entering now, these gambits started working less and less. I remember one day after school, sitting down on the edge of my mother’s dark bed and prattling on about some award I won that day or how a hated rival of mine bombed a test. The report was always about how I aced something and how my enemies fell. We thought this was the kind of story she liked. (As she said to my sister one day, excitedly, about a billboard she had seen: “When you put the ‘oomph’ behind ‘try’ you get ‘tri-oomph’!”)

Anyway, so there I sat wittily prattling on in a way I still do—I like to tease people with a bit of gossip, give them a little
amuse-bouche
of random detail, and then serve the main meal of it, the red meat encircled with garnish. I sat there wittily prattling—adding funny descriptions of wacky hair and what was said and what went wrong—and then I looked up, saw her dead eyes, and heard her say, “Mouseling? I’m sorry. I just don’t care. I have things of my own to worry about.”

The throwing of the Pyrex was nothing.

It was in that moment that something died.

When did she lose her will for all of it?

I remember my mother driving around in Brazil where, due to a university job of my father’s, we lived for two years. I remember how she drove around aimlessly in the afternoons because she literally did not want to go back home to the dark, narrow student dorms (with monklike single beds in a row) where my cheapskate-to-the-death dad insisted we live. My father stamped out her spirit, again and again. There was no escape for her. She had no workplace, or mortgage of her own, or a Mr. Y. She did not even have Judith’s house on Sunswept to visit. She had only the car, and the empty rainy streets. I feel so badly for her. I feel her sadness so deeply. I miss my mother so terribly, like a hole in my heart. . . .

And I feel rage that
he
is still alive!
Why! Why? Why
?

Why does the grotesque live, dragging us down? Why does he live on like a wizened diapered baby while my mother has been dead already for so many years? Why did I need to face adulthood without a mother?

I remember when my kitten got run over. My mother was devastated. She put it in a green garbage bag and cried and cried. She said she couldn’t stop picturing that little cat. Just as I couldn’t stop picturing poor Hammy the Hamster. Tumbling and tumbling and tumbling.

“We know you’re not feeling well, Mom,” Hannah says, turning elegantly, balletically, to pick something up from the nightstand. “So I made you a card.” She opens it for me. It reads:

Dear Mommy,

Get Well Soon.

You work so hard,

You need a break,

You have more stress,

Than we could take,

So just shut your eyes,

Lie down, relax,

Throw around money,

Who gives a shit about tax?

I UNDERSTAND AND FOREVER

LOVE
You!

Hannah!!!

“Is this from . . . the three-hole-punch-paper packet? In the cabinet?” I ask. “That I bought for that project I’m working on?”

Hannah pauses, guarded, like a deer at a water hole.

“Oh never mind, honey,” I say, taking her hand. “Thank you.”

Then I turn over and cry.

The next gambit is breakfast. The girls decide they will bring me breakfast. Not hungry at all, I obediently hobble downstairs like an invalid and sit on the porch on the outdoor chaise, like a muffin, under my comforter. I know there is a bit of self-interest here: My girls wait for any opportunity to invade the kitchen and start a huge messy project—cookies, lemonade, cupcakes, Depressed Mother Special Breakfast. The ants, however—just as Mr. Y predicted—are gone. The teeny-tiny armies of darkness have gone home.

Sally comes out as a waiter (sweatshirt around waist) and presents my feast. First comes her special scrambled eggs with cinnamon, pumpkin-pie spice, basil, and what appears to be a little bit of orange. It is not delicious. Here comes another moment of despair. Ever since I let the girls and their cousins perform “Sliced” (a kid version of the cooking show
Choppe
d
) in my kitchen, where some of our “found” ingredients included canned pineapple and stale mini-marshmallows and expired Ricola cough drops (which actually got grated into a burrito), very strange cooking things have begun to occur. It is yet another example of how I have let the horses run out of the barn on this whole parenting thing.

And yet I think of Judith’s coffee rule. You must transcend your actual candid response to the food, and just appreciate the gift of being brought it. I pretend to enjoy some and Sally beams.

I GO
lie in Sally’s large bed in her room, which, due to a cable logistical snafu, in fact holds our house’s only TV.
SpongeBob SquarePants
is on, but not too loud, so it is passable. Sally is crocheting. Hannah is Kindle-ing. I am trying to look at an article I am working on, but can’t for the life of me focus. Eventually I just put it aside and stare up at the sunlight on the ceiling. I invade my daughters’ space by insisting on grabbing an arm of one and circling my ankle around that of another and this feels good. My heart-pounding lessens somewhat.

I remember when they were toddlers and we would lie together in the king bed back in the old house in the afternoon in the sun. Or at night, when sometimes I would sleep across the bottom of the bed, which is the absolute best place on the bed, it is like a totally new mattress because no one goes there, and I would feel complete, like a great universal zero with two Xs on me keeping me securely moored and on earth.

I start to sense, amid the gray, flecks and darts of warm color flitting through the air above me. I am trying to grasp at what they are and trying to articulate them. I realize, as the light lightens somewhat, that I have memories of some real pleasures. I am confessing things to my girls, in half-bitten-off sentences that don’t even make any sense.

“Oh honeys, I know this sounds weird, but I remember how I used to actually kind of enjoy breast-feeding you—”

“
Eeew
,” they both say.

“Oh kids, come on.”

What I mean—but don’t say—was that there was a time when an inestimably rich atomic soup of hormones was swimming, when I was young, when love was grand and large and easy, and I had a small earth-smelling creature and my only job was to keep feeding it. You could lie in a sunny bed in an afternoon, hook the small fluffy head into your body, have a beer even, and not give a worry about work or laundry or e-mail or for that matter, even dinner. There is this time during babydom that the mother herself can lie about like a baby, like a beached whale, having birthed her bloody spawn, and the mother can just hover in those sparkling dust motes of afternoon sun and be cradled and lifted and suspended in the golden light.

“Oh don’t worry—it was just kind of a hormonal thing,” is what I finally say.

“Nonetheless there will be no breast-feeding today,” says Hannah firmly, and this strikes us all as funny. I snuggle back into her side, hard.

We spend the rest of the day in bed watching television. In the early afternoon something magical happens. Our favorite demon show comes on. “Oh God!
Mustard Pancakes
!” they scream. “Mom! There it is! A totem from our wretched childhood!” Indeed it is: It is a now-amusing nostalgic memory from their grotesque toddler years of being pulled across Target parking lots and peeing on car seats and hurling Skee-balls at Chuck E. Cheeses. It is from a time when, while single-parenting, I let my daughters watch as much television as hospital patients in full-body casts. “This really is a very bad show,” I agree. “It’s like dirty sock puppets.” We also eat and make buckets of popcorn—butter, salt, no apologies. It’s amazing how deeply relaxing bad habits can be.

“If my mom had only had a television in her bedroom!” I half joke.

IN THE
morning at six fifteen I am resigned to my day but not actually incapacitated. I am regretfully pouring my coffee into its ridiculously cute mug and smearing PB and J on a bagel. Which is to say it is Monday morning at six fifteen, and for some godforsaken and unbelievable reason I feel . . . okay. Let’s say the word slowly, as if to preschoolers:
O-o-o-k-a-y!
I don’t feel great, but I am functional. I wait for it to come down, but it does not come down.

I am startled by Hannah appearing suddenly behind me. This is unusual—usually she waits upstairs for me to bring breakfast. Hannah puts her arms around me and kisses me on the nose. She makes some shy but insistent
wuvvy-wuvvy-wuvvy
sounds.

“Oh God,” I say. “Here you are kissing your mommy on her
wuvvy-wuvvy
nose. I feel absolutely pathetic.”

We laugh.

Driving to school, it appears we are going to be late, I am slaloming through traffic, and now Sally is starting to make high-pitched panic sounds because I haven’t filled out her emergency form. I declare loudly that we will not have panic. We will not have panic. “We won’t have panic over the emergency form!” I yell, feeling a rise of panic.

“Sally, it will be fine,” Hannah says quickly and firmly to her sister, and in that moment I see a flash of something I’ve never seen before. It is the unguarded, careful, even slightly frightened face of the wary older daughter, keeping the other children in line, but maintaining a light, studiedly casual singsong as she does so. Because Mother is fragile, and I am her ward, even responsibility, Hannah is patrolling the perimeter.