Crazy Enough Read online

  It wasn’t just the punching myself to sleep and all the rest that let me know something was wrong with me. I was a weirdo, a total outcast. Every day at school was the worst day of my life. I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I had invisible pets that I talked to in public. I was just as quick to be completely destroyed by an unkind word as I was to smash someone in the face for hurting someone else. Everything mattered more to me than everyone else. And no matter how hard I tried, I was always in trouble, because I could never be quiet or disappear. And the one person, in the whole world, who I knew loved me completely, the only one who told me I was beautiful and could do or be anything, kept running away to die.

  My grandmother on my father’s side, Neeny, told me that she never liked the way Mom looked at me. “She was obsessed with you. It just wasn’t right.” I loved it, though, Mom really could light up a room or a rainy day like no one else. Besides, Neeny used to drive her Chrysler LeBaron around, wearing huge black postcataract surgery glasses, and scream at those GODDAMNED WOMEN DRIVERS!

  My mom loved me so much it made me feel famous. But that had been a long time ago, and at around nine or ten, it stopped being so great. Her loving me that much was just a trick. Around that time, I also stopped wanting to be just like her. She was weak and needy, so I acted tough. Everyone was still compelled to say how alike we were, but I figured if I acted strong and practiced not giving a fuck, they would eventually stop saying, “You are just like your mother!” Boy, was I wrong.

  The doctor wasn’t even looking at me when he said it; he was writing something down for a nurse. It was so casual that he didn’t seem to think that he was really dropping some bomb on my skull. He acted more as if he were reminding me of something I had always known, like my middle name or where my grandparents lived.

  This happened during a bad visit. Generally speaking, a bad visit was anything from being turned away because Mom was too fucked up to see anyone or the hospital staff would let us up to see her, only to find out when we got there that she was too fucked up to see anyone, and then we’d have to leave.

  On this day, it was the latter.

  Mom was wasted and had thrown herself on the floor in front of us in the hallway begging for forgiveness, “Please don’t hate me!” She cried and keened, her breath so pitifully short that she could barely talk. She collapsed on the floor in a dead heap, but was so tiny that my father and a nurse could scoop her up like a wet hand towel to help her walk down the hall back to her room. She was never really loud or scary, no wailing or screaming. She would bend under some inescapable sad weight, and slowly break in front of us.

  As she slumped against them padding limply back down the hall, she begged my dad to forgive her and “Please don’t stop loving me Henny, please . . .” She wept helplessly.

  My brothers and I knew to stay put. John and Henry went around the corner to the common room. I hung back with Dr. Lovey.

  Mom called everyone Lovey. If she knew you for five minutes, you were Lovey.

  Her psychiatrists were no exception. They were all familiar characters as Mom got locked up more and more frequently, and I was used to being around them. It was nothing for me to chat with Dr. Lovey and practice being the tough little girl who was totally unfazed by the madness or sadness she’d just seen.

  “Oh, well,” I shrugged, my sneakered heel bouncing on the floor.

  “Your mom’s been having a hard week, but she’ll be okay, Stormy,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know; it’s no big deal.”

  He was still writing with his head down. I hated the quiet.

  “At least I’m not gonna be crazy like her. Right?”

  You know when you ask a question you already know the answer to, and you’re just trying to make conversation? You’re being friendly, engaging, filling up any uncomfortable, quiet gaps? Like, “Dontcha just love chocolate?” or “What the heck is the deal about cats and Christmas tinsel anyway? You know it ends up in their poop, right? Stupid cats.”

  I expected that he would guffaw and say, “Oh, silly girl, of course not!” Then he would ruffle the hair on my silly head as he passed by me on his way to do some doctoring elsewhere.

  But, barely giving me a glance, Dr. Lovey nodded and said, “Oh. Well, yes. It’s hereditary. You will absolutely end up like your mother.”

  My heel stopped bouncing.

  As he tore off the piece of paper he’d been scribbling on and got up to leave he said, I imagine to comfort me, “Probably not until your twenties, or when you have children, whichever comes first.”

  All I remember after that was getting very hot in my face and standing very still in the doorway. I bit my cheeks, heard the ker-plip-ker-plop of ping-pong around the corner. I wanted to walk away, take back the question, go back in time, ask him about something else, change the subject, or shut up. But, instead, I was frozen. Dr. Lovey, on his way out, said something about how lucky I was that we knew so much about my mother’s illness, now, so that when the time came for me to get treatment, not to worry, we’ll know how to take care of it, then left.

  Just like your mother.

  My dad never mentioned it to me. At some point, I know, my mom and one of her Dr. Loveys had suggested examining us, but my father would have none of it. I remember hearing him say, when he was recalling the let’s-have-the-children-looked-at conversation with a friend of his, “You already got my wife, I’ll be damned if you think I’m gonna give you my fucking kids.” Dad didn’t call any of the doctors Lovey; he called them all a bunch of screaming assholes.

  No, Dad wasn’t going to send me into treatment. Hell, it pissed him off enough when I had to go to the hospital just to get stitches. In that regard, I knew I was safe.

  But asshole or not, Lovey was a doctor. He wore the white coat and name tag and had that chilly white voice we were so used to hearing. All swoop-y with pretend caring. He was clearly a medical authority, a grown-up, so I believed him.

  I was going to be just like her. And everyone said so.

  The next time that Mom got sent to Sadville was the summer my brother John and I seriously considered killing her. I was eleven and all summer the universe conspired to take my childhood and give it to that little blonde. She was so greedy, mewling for our love and attention, taking it, then turning around and telling anyone in earshot that we hated her. Dad had pretty much washed his hands of the whole thing, and nobody blamed him. He worked so hard only to give every penny to this or that institution or pharmacy, each promising to bring his wife, life, and sunshine back. All it seemed to do, though, was embolden all the stupid doctors to make more and more ridiculous diagnoses and write dopier prescriptions, some that would make my mom weave and wobble in her body like a cartoon chicken on a unicycle. Each doctor acted as though they had all the answers, and every single one was wrong. It was as if they were all horny to find more stuff wrong with her, and keep her sick and medicated.

  After many sad and frustrating years of that, Dad checked out. He worked all school year, teaching history and coaching, then in 1980, took a summer job as a lifeguard at a water park near Little Boar’s Head, or Boarsie, a town near Rye, New Hampshire. He and his dog Tilly could live all summer at the beach and have a nice, ninety-odd miles between himself and reality. Henry was off at awesome American camp. John and I stayed home, smoked pot, and grew thick calluses all over our hearts. John had his license now, and that meant we had Mom duty.

  Mom duty basically involved us going to the hospital, bringing her a carton of Kool Milds, chocolate-covered cherries, and clean underpants.

  “Something’s gotta give,” we would say every time we left. “She’s gotta go.” We weren’t complete bastards, but Mom clearly wanted out, so why not give her a hand? We were mostly kidding when we joked about putting a hit on her or going through the phone book to find Mafia-sounding names. Callous humor was the only thing that made the crazy tolerable. Whenever we’d hear an ambulance siren blaring by we’d say, “Th
ere goes Mom.” when someone asked what our parents did for a living we’d say, “Our dad works but our mom is broken.”

  It was a long, hot summer with varying degrees of horrible after each hospital visit. There was always some new drama with one of her new pyromaniac rapist friends, or Dr. Lovey would be changing her medication and she would be a complete mess. She would rattle her pink plastic pill dispenser, like a doll’s ice cube tray, embossed with M T W T F S S for the days of the week, and say, “Lovey is taking me off all my meds. I’m better now that we know what’s wrong! See? No more pills! I’m only taking this one for voices, this one for shaking, this one for sleepy-sleepy-nye-nye and this one . . .”

  One of the last times I saw my mom in that hospital was a blazing late-August afternoon. John and I pulled up to Sadville, armed to the teeth with her smokes, clean underpants, and loads of sarcasm. The air was smudged with humidity, wavering a couple feet above the ground, blurring the edges of everything. A great day to be slathered in Bain De Soleil and flirt with the tattooed carnies at my dad’s water park, or just run into some cold water, like kids were doing everywhere else that day.

  Instead, we walked up the cement steps into the main office to sign in and wait for Nursezilla to come grunt us up to our mom’s floor. When we said Large to the sign-in nurse she looked on a clipboard and quickly sat up very straight, smiled phonily and awfully, and said, “Um . . . yes. Could you please wait over there for a moment? Someone will be here soon, to talk with you.”

  To talk with us?

  John went stone quiet. His face was stiff under his long rock ’n’ roll hair.

  We sat on the sofa across from the front desk, the sign-in nurse smiling nervously if she caught us looking her way. She busied herself with some papers and kept her head down.

  John and I stared blankly forward.

  “She’s dead. She fucking did it. She’s dead,” I said out loud, not looking at him. I knew full well my big brother had already come to that conclusion. What I wondered was, did we make this happen? Does John think we made it happen?

  I was immediately ashamed of myself. All the joking . . . I felt like a bully who had terrorized a little dog and then watched it sprint into oncoming traffic. A tiny living being, so twisted and miserable from God knows what, but all she wanted in the whole world was to be loved. And one by one, all the loved ones in her life gave up on her and pulled away. Including her children. My faced burned. I wanted her to die, and now . . .

  “Hi there,” someone was singing at us. “You must be Stor-meee!”

  I looked up to see a middle-aged woman in a pink pantsuit standing in an office doorway. John and I were pulled from our reverie and beckoned into a bright office, blasted with air conditioning. I instantly had gooseflesh all over my arms and legs. We sat on one side of a massive desk, she on the other. A plaque on the desk read Dr. Candy Something-ski.

  “So, how are you kids doing?”

  Next to her name plaque was a menagerie of ceramic Siamese kittens, frozen and shiny. They were posed to look like they were suspended in midplay. All around the room were the trappings of someone who had to bullshit families as their primary source of income. On the walls were framed posters of soft-focus vistas, those typical shots of seascapes and rainbows with birds stretching across them. Some had motivational phrases about footsteps and paths and shit. There were other glass critters here and there, all peeking their heads around, giving the impression that they were all paying attention. Like they cared.

  I wanted to smash everything I saw.

  Dr. Candy opened her mouth to sing again, this time to my brother who just stared at his thumbs.

  “Is she dead?” My voice did not sound as tough as I’d hoped.

  An expression twitched over her before the cough-syrup smile of gigantic fake empathy returned. The look that lit for a nanosecond on her face was a cold, sharky indifference with a barb of “I’ve heard about you, you mouthy little fucker, don’t interrupt me again or you’ll be frozen in glass faster that you can read the motivational messages on my wall.”

  I could feel the bitch, and she hated me. Fuck her.

  “Is. She. Dead?” I refused to look at her, staring at the tiny ball of yarn in the grip of the tiny ceramic cat whose tiny butt pointed up. Someone thought it a good idea to paint a tiny butthole under its upturned tail.

  “Suzi’s had a bad day.” She turned her lollipop charm back on me, talking at me as if I weren’t real. I looked at John, then at his thumbs as he didn’t lift his eyes, then back to the ceramic kitty butthole. “And it seems she’s been trying to hurt herself, and,

  and . . .”

  “We know she wants to fucking die already, that’s why she’s here. Do we need to identify her body or sign something, because I have to get the fuck out of here, okay?””

  I jumped to my feet, swatting the little animals off the desk and onto the floor.

  “Not dead,” said the candy-coated Disney bitch without singing.

  She tried to regain her cough-syrup tone, saying that Mom was okay but we could not see her. She offered us no condolences or details. As we got up to leave, she told us someone from the hospital would let us know when it was okay to come back and visit. My brother thanked her, I think. But his voice was so low that he could’ve said “Fuck you, lady.” And made it sound like thanks. John was so cool. I was not. I made sure my feet crunched over the bits of porcelain kitty heads and snapped little paws on my way out.

  We found out, later, that Mom had smashed her lily-of-the-valley perfume bottle in the sink and carved herself up pretty good with a shard. She probably had no idea we had even come that day, as she lay somewhere wearing gauze opera gloves, barely able to form a sentence from all the drugs they pumped her with.

  I tried so hard to be hard. To not care, make no big deal, and be tough. My brothers could do it, but me? I sucked at not caring.

  My dad was the best at looking tough. He told me his secret, once. We were in the car heading back to Southborough from Boarsie. It had been a glorious day of sun and ocean. As the afternoon crept into a warm, orange evening, we all enjoyed an impromptu clambake, with my brothers and I, Dad’s parents and family, all my cousins, extended summer friends, dogs, and Frisbees. We all stuffed ourselves with clams, lobster, and buttered heaps of corn on the cob. The grownups smoked and drank beer and the kids ran amok in the cooling sand.

  My brothers had stayed behind, and Dad brought me with him as he went back for some Mom-related crisis. I sat in the front seat with my sand-sticky feet on the dash, staring hard out the passenger side window. I didn’t want Dad to see my face, crumpling around my stupid, indulgent tear ducts. We were rolling under passing streetlights on our way to I-95, and I didn’t want him to know I was crying. Crying was weak.

  My throat was tight and big fat tears welled behind my lids. I tried to do the tough thing, the correct thing, and quickly wipe anything that fell from my lashes. I guess only a dumb kid would think holding one’s breath and wiping each eye every three seconds while staring ferociously out the window wouldn’t betray the truth.

  “What is it?” my dad asked sweetly. Of course, it made me cry harder. I strained every facial muscle I had, trying to stop the tears. I folded my arms tighter and higher and shook my head quickly.

  “In a minute,” I tried to say, but my voice was that gapping, breathy, crying girl voice. Mom’s voice. I was so embarrassed. I was scared that Dad might get angry if he knew what I was thinking. As soon as we were on the dark highway, headed south, my breathing smoothed out and I could talk without sounding like Mom. “I loved today. I love our family,” I started.

  “Me, too,” he said, waiting.

  “It’s just that . . . Mom doesn’t have this. She never did, and it’s all she has ever wanted. It just doesn’t seem fair, you know?” I felt tears coming again, but my dad spoke up immediately.

  “You know what I do, when it all gets to be too much?” He wasn’t
angry at all. He sounded like his teacher self, wise and calm, not the hurt man ready to flip out if someone burnt a pot of hot cocoa. “I take all of those feelings, all the sad and scary feelings, and I lock them in a box inside my head. You don’t have to feel them at all, just put them away. You can deal with them later.”

  Oh, how I tried to find that manly box in my head, to stuff it with all my crazy thoughts and feelings, but I just couldn’t do it. All my emotions whipped and jumped through me like a pack of cracked-out monkeys. I was convinced that I felt more than anybody else. Not only my own, but I could also feel other people’s feelings, too. Though I tried on the mantra “He who cares the least wins,” trying not to feel, for me, was crazy making.

  Back at Sadville, John and I sat in the car, hot as a fevered ear from baking in the parking lot. I broke down, hot tears spitting through my stinging eyes. “Something’s got to give, and it was almost her. She did it again; I can’t believe she did it again.”

  John must’ve thought I meant the attempt itself. I didn’t. I meant that I had just started to get my footing that summer, where I could laugh and be okay with the way things were. Giving the world the finger from a nice, sarcastic place to hide. Mom got her sad, little girl fingers into my guts, to fuck me up again. “I fucking wish she’d done it, man, fuck her.” She got me to care. Again.

  Gotcha.

  Since I knew I was going to lose my mind, I figured the best thing to do was lose my virginity. Fast. I wasn’t super attached to it anyway.

  In the provincial enclave of Southborough, Massachusetts, there was a lot of chatter one year about the white van. Ask anyone who was around St. Mark’s School in the seventies and say, “Remember the white van?” Chances are someone will, and say, ‘“Oh yes, the rapist.” By all accounts, nobody was ever raped by anyone in any white van, but it was a hot topic for awhile, and Mom loved it. Rape was a big thing with my mom. It’s how she told me about sex.