Crazy Enough Read online

  My burgeoning relationship with ChapStick was around 1976, our nation’s bicentennial, but all the fireworks going off in the country didn’t hold a candle to the joy I had discovered in myself with masturbation. It was the light and the way out of my loneliest feelings. It was around that time that I started to figure out why my mom wanted to die. If she couldn’t feel like that anymore, I could understand why anyone would want to stop living. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t figure out why she tried to kill me.

  I was seven years old. It was more of a mishap on the way to another attempt on her own life, so I can’t really say it was deliberately sinister. What made it irritating, however, was that she did it while I had a friend over.

  Daphne was my best and, pretty much only, friend. She was a cherubic blonde with cartoon-huge hazel eyes beaming from her porcelain heart-shaped face. We had known each other forever, as her mom and my dad were both teachers in our little town of Southborough. We were born three months apart, were the only members of the Animal Club, and we both loved Lucan, the Wolf Boy, the best show ever.

  My two big brothers and I were used to Mom being a little off every now and then, but this particular night, she was in a rare state of fucked. She had downed a dozen or so Thorazine washed down with some Tab, before making dinner. She was wobbling around the kitchen, muttering incoherently to herself while puttering at the stove.

  Daphne knew my mom was sick. She also knew that my mom had to go away once in awhile, because there would always be some new babysitter living with us, or I would end up sleeping over at her house now and then on school nights.

  Daphne’s mom and dad never talked about what was happening at my house; they would just set a place for me at the table and treat me like their own kid. Daphne and I would never talk about it, either; we would just do what little girls do. We’d hunt frogs and snakes down at the pond, talk about what we were going to do when we had boobs, steal her brother’s Playboy and Penthouse magazines, stuff like that. Daphne knew there was something funny going on, because she was family, but she’d never actually seen the crazy happen. Until . . .

  “Dih-nerrr,” Mom creaked in a shaky sigh.

  She moved as though through syrup, as she thunked down our bowls of food at our places. We all came to the table. The kitchen was a seventies beige with greasy, flat carpeting. It had probably been nice carpeting once, a million years ago, back when people thought carpets were groovy to have in kitchens. I have no idea what color it had been originally, but now it was sticky and dark, smelling of onion soup and Windex.

  Daphne and I sat together, Henry sat across from us, and Daddy sat at the head of the table.

  I had been calling my oldest brother, John, “Daddy” since I was four. There was no confusion as to who my real father was, but John, six years older than I, was the man of the house, as Dad stayed at work as long and late as he could. John was thirteen and had the pimples and bad temper to prove it. He sat down, looked at the stuff in his bowl, and shot me a look from under his shaggy mop of brown hair. His dark blue eyes read both angry and embarrassed. Henry, my ten-year-old golden-boy brother, sat down and didn’t look at anyone. He just bit his lip and stared at his bowl.

  Both of my brothers were already great athletes, but John had recently started to like pot, girls, and Led Zeppelin. Henry had gone the other way completely. Excelling in football and lacrosse during the school year, then off to this or that awesome American camp for sports or just becoming more of an awesome American. He had begun to emulate his namesakes, my father and grandfather, and pursue a military, upstanding, conservative, and painfully normal life. Henry needed normal. He hated this.

  I was a weirdo. I was loud and annoying by nature and pretty sure, if I pushed hard enough on the toilet my penis would finally appear. My dearest wish was to be attacked by a werewolf, so I could become a werewolf, too, and live in a secret fort with my werewolf boyfriend, forever. I was also trying every possible way to learn how to fly by flapping magazines in each hand and jumping off cars and furniture. But this . . . even this was too screwy for me.

  I got louder and sillier to distract from the thick, weird silence, talking about so-and-so boy at school was a bum-bum head and how when he talked it smells like a bottom burp. I hoped to God that Daphne didn’t notice the tension growing in the room. She sat politely with her hands folded in her lap and watched the pretty little blonde lady she also called “Mom” stammering breathy nonsense while scooping food into her bowl. It was clear Daphne knew something was up, as she glanced now and then around the table at us, her eyes questioning.

  I gave up my attempt at potty-humor-as-distraction when I saw and smelled what sat in our bowls.

  We all stared at Mom who floated into her chair. She made yummy noises as she pulled her bowl towards her and started to eat. She wasn’t using a regular spoon, she held on to the long orange plastic one she had used to stir and serve the gloppy food into our bowls.

  Her nerves and muscles seemed to jog inside her body, making her head, arms, and torso nod rhythmically as she sat, aiming the huge spoon at her mouth, barely managing to feed herself. She looked like a toddler pretending to eat imaginary food with toy utensils and a severe lack of coordination, without a whiff of embarrassment. The table was quiet except for Mom humming and gurgling and a rhythmic thudding of her leg hammering lightly on its heel.

  I mouthed the words “don’t eat it” to Daphne.

  “Mom,” John said finally.

  “Ye-hessh, shweetie?” she said to something about four feet over John’s head.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s shicken mush! Who-ooo wants mo-ooore?” Then half asleep on her feet, she drifted in a zigzag path back to the stove to refill her bowl.

  Daphne and Henry stared quietly at their food. John got up from the table and trotted upstairs. “Why is it blue?” I asked, trying to sound tough and accusing, but it came out as an embarrassed whine.

  I didn’t see any chicken anywhere in the frothy, teal colored gruel that sat in my bowl like a wet, poisonous frog. It was lumpy and foamy and had a bleachy smell. Mom had slurped a whole bowl of it into herself, and was scraping out the saucepan for the rest. John came back to the table, gave Henry some money, and told us all to go get a pizza. Then he took off out the door to get our dad, who was at school a football field away. Henry, Daphne, and I didn’t talk about what we had seen as we walked downtown, but I wondered what Daphne was going to tell her family when they asked, “How was dinner?”

  Later, back at home, I saw my mom being walked into an ambulance with Dad behind her carrying her little blue suitcase.

  Shicken mush. It turns out, after they had pumped her stomach, there really was chicken in it after all. There was chicken soup, oatmeal, and Calgonite dishwashing powder.

  I loved my mom more than anything. She was a cross between Grace Kelly and Sandy Duncan, but with two good eyes. When I was little I knew she was the most beautiful woman in the whole world. To me she looked like a Disney princess, a magical lady that birds and baby deer would follow around, eating out of her hand. Not an elegant lady about town, more a pretty, pixielike girlie girl. I had no idea that a lot of people in our sleepy little town thought she was . . . odd.

  As I got older, I started to notice eyes rolling her way. My mom was bright and chatty—a chime-in-loudly-on-any-conversation type person—but it turned out that was a social no-no for the prep-school set. Plus, she was a mere twenty-two when she and my dad took up residence at St. Mark’s School.

  My dad always comments on his lucky break in landing a job at St. Mark’s. When he was done with his tour of duty in the Marine Corps in 1965, he went to his alma mater, Princeton University, to meet with the woman in charge of placing graduates into their ideal employment situations. She asked him where he wanted to live, what did he want to teach, and would he also like to coach football? Then, she handed him a piece of paper with a name, phone number, and an address.
In July of that same year, Dad, Mom, and three-year-old John moved from my grandparents’ farm in Pennsylvania, to St. Mark’s School, in Southborough, Massachusetts, where Dad would teach, coach, and mentor, nonstop, for forty-five years.

  Friends referred to them as “the golden couple.” My dad, an Ivy League, ex-Marine lieutenant, was manly handsome. He stood a healthy six foot one, one blue eye, one green eye, with jet-black Superman hair. My mom looked like a giggling tow-headed fairy that could pirouette across a field of buttercups and not bruise a single one.

  I think some of the older, dumpier ladies around school took my mom’s youthful sparkle as the antics of someone who thought a bit too much of herself. Most of the faculty wives at St. Mark’s were bookish and preppy, embracing a more matronly aesthetic. Think lots of brown wool skirts with pale ankles dumping into squeaky duck boots. My mom stood out. Stood out like a slice of summer sun beaming into a punishing cold January. She twinkled in complete contrast to those dour prep-school hens, and they did not care for it at all. Within the stiff, Tudor walls of St. Mark’s, if you stood out, or thought you were special in any way, you were on your own . . . a lesson I learned for myself years later.

  I remember witnessing affectionate moments between my parents, even though things would soon get to the point when it became hard to imagine them even in the same room together without getting a stomachache. But they loved each other long enough to get pregnant three more times after John.

  Mom always had trouble with her girl parts, she’d say. Her pregnancies and her periods were rough going, but her miscarriage nearly did us both in. She was four months or so along when she lost the baby, and it knocked her out for awhile. Mom was twenty-six, John was five, Henry was two, and the doctors recommended a hysterectomy. They told my parents that Mom’s endometriosis wasn’t going to get any better, and since they already had two healthy boys . . . But Mom wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted a baby girl. She promised to have the surgery, as soon as she had a girl.

  Mom loved telling me, and anyone in earshot, how I nearly killed her, but June 25, 1969, twenty-four hours of labor and one blood transfusion later, she got her little girl and all the terrible tales of woe that would come with me. Yay! You’re welcome, Ma!

  When I was around six months old, the doctors finally got to melon ball her reproductive system. And, supposedly, that was just the ticket, until she started trying to kill herself.

  Before Mom had any official diagnosis that I knew of, it was just, “Mom’s tired.” It would go like this: We all came flying in from school in a blur of noise and book bags. My brothers were usually caked with mud from sports or brawling, while I would be covered in paint with some huge piece of construction paper with leaves or some other crap glued all over it. We would barrel into the house and stop short at the sight of Dad by himself or one of our rotation of babysitters. “Where’s Mom?” one of us would ask.

  “She’s resting.”

  “Resting where?”

  “At the hospital.” And that would be the end of the conversation.

  The whole “tired” explanation made sense for awhile, because right before she would disappear she would usually seem . . . well . . . tired. She’d either be in bed for days and days, or she would move sleepily, and appear brittle and frail. She would stare at her food, out a window, or at one of us. She would get all weepy, and then, she’d just be gone.

  I loved hospitals in the beginning. Mom was my favorite human being on the planet, so when she was in the hospital, well, that was the place to be! Plus, visiting Mom was like a big family outing. My dad, brothers, and I would pile into “Sunshine,” the yellow Volvo, and off we would go. We’d usually stop at a drugstore to buy her some smokes or some candy or her favorite perfume: “Muguet,” a soapy, lily-of-the-valley scent my mom absolutely soaked herself in.

  Sometimes, my dad would give us a couple of bucks each to buy her a present, if it was a special occasion like her birthday, or Mother’s Day. I’m pretty sure every single Mother’s Day of my childhood was spent in some smoke- and psycho-filled hospital common room. Now that I think of it, pretty much the same goes for any holiday, our birthdays, Easter, Arbor Day, but if it was Mother’s Day, we were definitely headed for this or that hospital with sparkly drugstore presents.

  We would all crowd around her, in her room or the common room. I would tell her about something stupid the cat did, sing her songs, and make friends with all the doctors and hospital people. Mom was in so many different hospitals for the first ten years of my life that some of the details blur together. For example, in the seventies, there was a common theme among all hospital common rooms. They stunk, for one. No amount of weapons-grade disinfectant could combat the stench of terrible coffee, pharmaceutical BO, despair, and about nine gajillion cigarettes. Those people smoked. In pretty much every hospital common room I ever saw, the walls, windows, and ceilings were slathered with tobacco sludge.

  There would also be, without fail, a ping-pong table. I played more fucking ping-pong as a kid in more hospital common rooms, that when I so much as hear the ker-plip-ker-plop of the game, my stomach drops.

  In general, something about seventies aesthetics were creepy even in the seventies. Even when grownups were growing their Chewbacca pubes and rapist mustaches, yanking up their camel-toe spandex to go roller skating around to key parties, I think even while the times swung, the people in it were creeped out by their own sepia-toned pre-Reagan-era, Polaroid existence.

  Regardless of bad taste and smelliness, if Mom was resting in any hospital, when it was time to see her, I was into it. When she would finally come home from the hospital? That was just emotional mayhem and the best! thing! ever!

  The second she got home with her little blue suitcase and plastic name bracelet, I would squeal, do a little dance, and be a tiny fireworks display of embarrassing little girlness. I would have a ream of pictures, fists full of whatever flowers were around, and have planned exactly what song I would sing for her, all the sentimental little things I wanted to share with her all planned in my head. She was gonna laugh, cry, and be so glad to be home that I wouldn’t have to worry about her leaving anymore.

  That was my movie. As the uplifting music would swell, the scene would fade to black, as the little girl and her mother would be holding hands, walking away from the camera, and toward the house as the sun went down, thus signifying completion of a trial or difficult period.

  It wasn’t until I was five when I realized that Mom and I were watching very different movies.

  I remember one time when Mom had just gotten home from a substantial absence, about two months. But home again, home again, jiggety jig. There she was, sitting on her bed with the green bedspread, her powder-blue suitcase at her tiny feet.

  She looked exhausted.

  I remember I hugged her where she sat with my arms around her tiny waist, my head in her lap, and I looked up at her.

  “Are you home forever?”

  “Forever and a day,” she said, stroking my hair.

  Panic. What does that mean?

  “Just a day?”

  “Forever and a day.” She was tired, but I could hear a tiny shred of amusement in her voice. Still confused, she’s using day and forever in the same sentence. If she’s home forever, days don’t matter, right?

  “Just a day?” I said quietly into her boobs. I didn’t get it. I wanted her to just say yes, sweetie, I’m not going to the hospital anymore, I will be here for breakfast and when you get home from school, we can watch television, and we can get married. It wasn’t hard to promise forever; I did it all the time. All she had to do was stay home.

  She didn’t say anything but I could tell she was looking at my dad while she stroked my head.

  Turns out, forever and a day equaled about a week and some change before she was gone again.

  I came flying in from school screeching for Mom to show her the marvelous ashtray I had made and glazed, myself, just fo
r her, because my love for her was so amazing. I found, instead, the broad back of my father, as he hunched over the sink washing dishes.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s resting.”

  “Resting where?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “Why can’t she rest here?” I yelled at his back.

  I couldn’t help it. I had been promised forever and a series of days after that. We were going to be together every day for the rest of our lives. She was going to smoke and use this unbelievable ashtray and love me so much more than God knows what, forever.

  My dad said nothing, but his body visibly cringed and tightened against my tiny air raid siren. He sighed into the sink.

  Everything with me as a child—and later on—was either the most exciting wonderful amazing you gotta come see this now thing ever or else the sun would be going black, it was raining frogs, and the hooves of plague were thundering around me. Sometimes, I wondered if I was too sensitive to even be alive. I still feel that way now and then, like a turtle yanked raw and naked from its shell and tossed, torn open and shrieking, into a sandstorm.

  To cover my sensitivity, I would be loud and annoying. Well, to my mind, at the time, I thought I was hilarious and entertaining. I could sing anything I heard on the radio, television, or eight-track; I could recite my favorite lines from Monty Python and Mel Brooks movies. I had no brains for books or math but, after the first time I heard Abbey Road, I could sing along to it the next time it was spun. I secretly thought I was a genius. But, in truth, to everyone else, I was just loud and annoying.

  So, standing in the beige, sticky kitchen, staring at the silence of my father’s huge back, the air still ringing with what my family referred to as my “burglar scream,” it dawned on me.

  Mom can’t rest at home because of me. Because I’m so loud and I talk too much, this whole thing was my fault. I have to shut up, I have to be quiet . . . mute . . . Marcel Marceau. Then she can come home.