Coming Clean: A Memoir (8 page)

I was a little too old to be sleeping in my parents’ bed, but my mother accepted my recent clinginess as a phase and never told me I had to leave. I was also too old for bedtime stories, but I told them to myself anyway. My most comforting fantasy starred my anatomically correct doll, Susan. She had an anatomically correct brother, Jerome, and my parents had used them both to teach me about the differences between boys and girls after I stumbled upon some inappropriate cable channels years earlier and told my class that boys had tails that they put in girls. I held Susan close to me, pretending I was her mother and that we were homeless.

In my story, I was a down-on-her luck mother living under a highway overpass with her infant daughter. It wasn’t hard to imagine. From mattress to wall, there was a solid bevy of stuff, newspapers and magazines that engulfed clothes and shoes and boxes and toys—they were the worn tires, cardboard boxes, and
general debris that I imagined found its home under a bridge. I promised Susan that I would find her someplace nice to live, and fell asleep each night singing her the lullabies my mother had sang to me.

I didn’t return to my own room when my father came home from the inpatient psychiatric facility a week after he left.

He had called my uncle Aaron, who was actually a friend of my mother’s from work, to pick him up and drive him home. My father never went anywhere without his gigantic key ring, but he rang the bell nonetheless and waited for me to answer it. We had stopped letting people into the house by this point, so I started to open the door the way I always had: just enough so that I could see the person standing in front of it, without them being able to get a real look inside. But when I saw that it was my father, I was so happy to see that he was home that I let the door swing open behind me so I could jump into his arms.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said as he picked me up. I started crying, overwhelmed by the fact that he was home and he was fixed.

My mom rushed outside, closing the door behind her to keep Aaron from seeing in. She and Aaron stood on the front lawn talking while my father and I went inside and got reacquainted with the house. I followed him as he made his way upstairs and to his bedroom.

“Wanna grab me a garbage bag?” he said, and I rushed downstairs to find the garbage bags on the mass of things that lived on the kitchen table.

We sat next to one another on the lower mattress in his bedroom, sorting papers. He examined each scrap of paper I handed him, scouring it for whatever it was that had made him think it
was important enough to keep in the first place. Things were put in two piles: treasures and trash.

“What was it like?” I asked him, handing him a brochure so he could decide its fate.

“It was like a hotel full of crazy people.”

“What did you do?” I had never known anyone who had gone to a mental hospital before, and I imagined that they put my father in a straitjacket and used electroshock therapy. That’s what I had seen on TV.

“Group therapy, mostly.”

“What did you talk about?” Assembly line–style questioning of my father was nothing new for me. I could listen to my father talk about nothing and everything for hours. It didn’t matter what the question I asked him was, the answer would inevitably take twists and turns through world politics, linguistics, poetry, and architecture, but getting him to tell me anything about himself required time and patience and a whole lot of pointed questions. In general, I was grateful for whatever nugget of personal insight he could spare, but this time I wanted a specific answer. I wanted him to say that he talked about me, that he wanted to be clean for me, and that I mattered more to him than all of his papers.

“Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t have much to say.”

His garbage bag wasn’t even a quarter full by the end of his first day home, and at the speed my father was going he would have the floor of his room clean in just under a thousand years. But he was trying, and that was enough for me.

I wanted my mother to be as excited to have my father back as I was, but she told me not to get my hopes up. The doctors
had diagnosed him as depressed with ADD—attention deficit disorder. “Your father is the least depressed person I have ever met,” she said. The doctors didn’t know why my father loved everything in the world so much that he had to live with it all, so they gave him a prescription for Prozac and sent him on his way.

He never filled his prescription.

T
HE NEW HOUSE HAD SPARKED
in us the feeling that we could fix all the things that were wrong with us. But I still wasn’t doing so great with socializing. And the mental hospital had only
kind of
helped my dad. He had become Dad-Light—mostly jovial, but there was still something missing in him. He was never again quite as interested in the world around him, a little more interested in the papers he carried with him and the voices coming from the radio. He wasn’t angry anymore, however, and I would take a jolly distracted dad over an angry distracted one any day. My mom was the only one of us left who had yet to fail at changing her life. I still believed that things would get better for us, and so when I was in fifth grade and she announced that she was going to have a series of spine surgeries to fix her back, I was optimistic that this was the change we’d all been waiting for.

The surgeries would, she said, keep her from shrinking even more than she already had. They would consist of steel rods being inserted into her back, which would gradually encourage her spine to straighten itself. Her doctor told her that she had the most severe case of scoliosis he had ever seen, and the surgeries
would probably not correct her curvature completely, but they would help. She might one day have an almost normal body.

We spent an entire year preparing for these two magical surgeries. I spent my weekends in hospital waiting rooms waiting for my mother to come back with news from her surgeon or the results of X-rays and CT scans, or sitting at her side as she donated blood for the doctors to use during her surgery. Boring, but exciting. My mom was going to be normal.

In early July, a week before her first surgery, she told me that if anything were to go wrong during the surgery she had requested that she be allowed to die.

“I don’t want to be a vegetable, and I couldn’t live as a paraplegic,” she said. “I want you to understand that if that happens, I wouldn’t be happy.”

I had always hoped that things were going to get better, but knew if there was an option to get worse, that that would probably happen. We weren’t the kind of people that good things happened to.

She went on to tell me that she had designated a friend of hers to be her health care proxy, not wanting my father to have to make the choice to let her die.

“I don’t want you to blame him,” she said.

When I woke up on the day of her first surgery, she was already at the hospital. She and my father had gotten up early to check her in to pre-op, and I had stayed up late soaking in every last minute with my mom. We both cried as we said our good-byes the night before. We had convinced ourselves that this surgery was a bad idea, but there was no backing out now.

The first surgery consisted of her stomach being cut open
from navel to back, her organs removed so that her intervertebral discs could be shaved and shaped to be make room for the rods.

I spent my day at summer camp, trying to succumb to the distraction of kickball and swimming lessons. When my father picked me up from camp, he said everything had gone according to plan, and I started to relax a bit. Things might be okay for us after all.

During the weeks of recovery between surgeries, my father would pick me up at my day camp after work and we would head to the hospital, where I would cuddle into Mom on her hospital bed and we would watch TV as a family. When visiting hours ended, my father and I would head to Wendy’s, where he would get a cheeseburger and I would get a chili from the dollar menu.

I looked forward to these dollar menu dinners all day. My dad, without the distractions of the radio or his papers, was all mine for a moment in time, and I used it to my advantage, asking him question after question about his life before me. He had told me there was a steel door in his head and that he couldn’t access the memories behind it, and so stories of his youth were rare, but with enough prodding he revealed that he had been a track star in his teenage years. I learned he had a cousin who had made the Olympic team in track and field, and I learned that he had planned to follow in her footsteps until another kid on his team attacked him after practice one day.

“The kid was just messing around, he wasn’t all right in the head,” my father said. But the damage caused by the attack required immediate surgery and put an end to my father’s track career.

I learned about his time in the army. There was more than
one guy in his platoon named Jesus Christ, which he got a big kick out of. He spent a good portion of his time in basic training in the brig at Fort Gordon locked up for going AWOL. He didn’t mean it, he said; he left because his mother was dying. He wanted to see her, and, not being one for protocol, he just picked up and headed back to New York. He came back to Georgia a few days later and was promptly arrested, but told me with a laugh, “These guys had mothers, too. I was locked up for awhile because that was what had to be done, but they counted the time as part of my service.”

I found out that he was sent to Vietnam for a while after, but was eventually transferred to a base in Germany where he spent the remainder of his service.

“There was this one time,” he said, already laughing, “this Hare Krishna started following me around, so I ducked into one of those blue-movie theaters to try and lose him, and he followed me right in. The two of us just stood there in the lobby of a porno theater together.”

I was shocked that my father had actually tried to avoid the Hare Krishna. When missionaries came to our door with books about Latter-day Saints and Jehovah, my father would greet them all with a smile, take their books, and invite them to come back in a week or so to discuss the literature. When they would inevitably come back, my father would stand with them on the front lawn and discuss the reading. My mother wouldn’t let me go out there with him, but I would quiz him about the religion of the week when he came back inside. Usually he’d ask if he could keep whatever book he’d borrowed, and he would pass off the books to me and encourage me to read them and see what I thought.

At home, after our Wendy’s dinnertime interrogations were over, my dad would go to his room to look through his papers, and I would go to my mom’s room and curl up to sleep with something from her closet that smelled like her.

By the time my mom’s body had healed enough to partake in the second surgery, I had forgotten all about my paranoia. But when my father picked me up from camp the day of the second surgery, I could tell I had let down my guard a little too soon.

“Mom’s surgery didn’t work,” he said as I buckled my seatbelt. Success and death were the only options I had considered; not working didn’t seem like a possibility.

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know. We’ll find out when we get to the hospital.”

We listened to
All Things Considered
on the way to the hospital, and we didn’t say anything else.

M
Y MOM WAS STILL SLEEPING
when we got to the hospital. Her doctor took my father aside to tell him about the surgery, and I stayed in the hospital room, staring at my mom. She was yellow and swollen. They’d cut her eyelashes off so that they could tape her eyes shut during surgery. She would hate that, I knew. My mother always told me how lucky I was to have black eyelashes. Hers were blond and took a great deal of mascara to become visible. I wouldn’t need makeup like she did—she had ordered all my parts before I was born, she said. Her skin, Daddy’s hair and straight back, Grandma’s nose, and Grandpa’s cleft chin. I turned out almost exactly as she’d planned, except for my legs—mine were not, even as a child, lean and shapely like hers, but instead thick and muscular like my father’s.

“I forgot about the legs,” she would say, apologizing. I would often brainstorm different traits I wanted my children to have one day. They all looked like some variation of me and Elijah Wood or Jonathan Brandis. I wouldn’t forget minor details like legs.

She hadn’t looked as bad after the previous surgery. Now,
even in her sleep, she looked defeated, a look she would never quite shake. Her body was huge—she had almost doubled in size from the bloat and bandages. This surgery had opened her from the nape of her neck to the bottom of her tailbone, and the doctors had closed her skin with giant staples that stuck out from her hospital gown.

I went outside to cry. I didn’t want her to wake up and see how scared I was, scared that my mother would be permanently damaged. Scared that I would have to rely on my father to take care of me, and scared to admit that I didn’t really trust him to do it.

I had cried myself out by the time my dad had gotten back and had started to doze off, a combination of spending all day in the sun and being emotionally exhausted.

As he nudged me awake, I questioned him: “What did the doctor say?”

“He said that Mom’s vertebrae were fused together, so they couldn’t put the rods in.” We stared at each other for a few minutes, neither of us knowing what to do next.

All the tests my mom had taken hadn’t revealed to the doctors that her spine had started to fuse to itself where her curvature was most acute. Putting the rods in would have pulled her vertebrae apart, potentially paralyzing her.

“Come on,” he said. “The anesthesia should wear off soon. Let’s go wait for Mom to wake up.”

There was nothing else to be done. My mother would be sent home in a few days to heal. Her abdominal muscles had been cut open during the first surgery and she could no longer walk on her own—she would spend the summer in bed, and then the
fall, winter, and following spring. Her body was fitted for a plastic brace that would be used in the few instances she needed to be wheeled outside of the house. The brace would do the heavy lifting of keeping her upright until her own body was once again capable.