Crazy Enough (25 page)

The word was that Mom was doing much better in her new situation, but I was, as usual, cautious, not wanting to get my hopes up. Slowly, as we chatted, though, I relaxed a bit. She seemed all right. We had tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. I met her new cat, and Mom appeared to be relatively balanced. She seemed to be doing well. We made plans to go to the mall the next day to shop and have lunch. “I'll give you a call and then come pick you up, say noon?”

“Sounds great, darling.”

Shopping and lunch, like real mothers and daughters do.

Around noon the next day I call her up. “Hey, Ma! You ready to hit the mall?”

She's sobbing. “I-I . . . I'm sorry Stormy . . . p-please don't yell at meee!”

“What happened? Are you okay, Mom . . . what's going on?” She sounded desperate, like someone had just let her have it, hurt her feelings, thrashed her with a car antenna. “Mom?”

“Pleeease!! I know, I know . . . I'm sooorry! Don't be mad at me, I'm so sorry!”

Then I heard another voice in the background, “Suzi. Hang up. You don't have to listen to that.” My blood instantly torched ablaze.

Gotcha.

She was putting on a fucking show for someone in the room with her. Selling the old “my daughter is so mean to me” ploy. I smashed the phone and raged through the house.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me forever . . . ? Well? Getting your heart broken and then to have your broken heart bamboozled over and over, over bullshit, made me nuts. She could get me on the phone every once in awhile, pretending to be dying or getting some sucker social worker to call me, sounding like a doctor, telling me she was dying. But I rarely spoke to her. So, when I got my dad's letter, I didn't need to be told again.

Somewhere in the spring of 2000, my band, now called Storm, Inc., was in the studio, tracking some new material. Though I was still stubbornly independent, the band was doing really well; we were more professional, businesslike, and tighter.

The songs had improved as well, so I was excited to record them. This particular time in the studio, however, for some reason, things just kept going wrong. The tape would get fucked up, the guitar couldn't get signal, speakers got blown. It was a friend's studio, far from a slick operation, but we were still paying for the time that was ticking by, getting us nowhere. I was getting pissed.

Finally, when it looked like we were good to lay down some basic tracks, the power went out. The whole studio went black.

“Fuck!” I shouted in the dark, kicking something near me.

“Don't worry, we'll get it!” said the engineer's voice, but I was already headed out to smoke a cigarette and fume in the parking lot. I went to get my smokes out of my bag and saw my pager.

There were three 911 pages from a 617 area code. Massachusetts plus nine one one equals Mom. My pager had voicemail so I checked that first. A stern woman's voice was telling me my mother was in the emergency room and was in dire condition. “This is so-and-so from such and such hospital, call me immediately.” According to the time stamp, the voice message had been left only fifteen minutes earlier.

The studio was dead, but the phone in the office was fine. “Such and Such Hospital,” chirped the woman who answered.

“I'm looking for So and So, this is Storm Large returning her call.”

“Just a moment.” Hold. “She's gone for the day.”

“She only called me fifteen minutes ago and said it was an emergency.”

“I'm sorry. She's gone.” I suddenly felt an old tired rage twitch its whiskers in me.

“May I ask, is this person . . . a
doctor
?”

“No ma'am, she's a social worker.”

A fucking social worker 911 paging me, sounding like a doctor,
again to tell me how my mom is in dire condition, again, and she needs to talk to me . . . why?

My hatred for some of these self-important social workers was hard earned. I imagine it is probably a thankless gig, lots of snooty doctors looking down on you, stinking bodily fluids looking up at you waiting to be sopped up and sanitized. Mom's doctors were starting to give her the “Yeah, right, lady” treatment, so she went to work on the second string for their sympathies. She even got one to pretend she was a therapist when I came to visit her once.

“You're mother's in here,” she said holding the door open to a small room near the nurse's station. Once inside she closed the door heaving her porky self onto a table. Then, with her well rehearsed therapy voice, asked, “So, Stormy, tell me why you hate your mother.”

“Huh? Mom?”

My mother sat in the corner opposite me in full regression, staring at a spot a foot in front of her jumping knees, squeezing both her two balled up hands between them. She bit her lip like a kid caught in a lie, awaiting punishment.

“Suzi, do you have anything you'd like to say to Stormy?”

Mom shot a miserable glance up at me then back to the floor, “I think Stormy is a-angry w-with me.” She pouted and struggled.

“S'cuse me but are you even a doctor?” I said to porky so-not-a-doctor.

Just then mom wailed, “DON'T HATE MEEEE!!” She then threw herself onto the spot she was staring at to bang her head against the floor at the cadence of her chanting, “Stu-pid! Stu-pid! Stu-pid!”

“GO GET SOMEONE YOU FUCKING IDIOT!” I screamed. She ran out. Nurses ran in. I left. Mom stayed.

After that, whenever a social worker would call on my mother's behalf, I would redline into fuck you very much in zero point suck it seconds.

“Is there a Suzi Large in the hospital somewhere?” I ask, trying not to spit the word
fucking
between every
fucking
word.

“Please hold.” Holding, smoking, hating, waiting.

“H-heeellooo-ooo?” Mom putting on her weakest voice.

“Mom?”

“Hello, darling.” Her award-winning, “I'm so weak but I will sound strong for you, dear,” voice.

“What's wrong, Ma?” I ask, knowing exactly what's wrong.

“Are you alone?”
The windup . . .

“Yup. All by myself. What's up?”

The deep sigh,
aaand the pitch,
“I have bone cancer, darling.”

The crowd goes wild!

“And I want us to handle this like a family. I don't want to do what Bitsy did.”

My aunt Bitsy, Dad's big sister, had kept her diagnosis a secret from her kids until it was certain she wasn't going to win the fight. I thought it was a classy move by a brave lady. Mom, on the other hand, would have loved nothing more than to see us tearing our hair out every day, beating our chests at her bedside to the rhythm of beeping hospital machines, until the fake cancer took her.

“Wow. That's terrible. Okay. Well. I gotta go, Ma, talk to you soon, okay?”

“Stormy. Are you all right?”

“Fabulous. You just worry 'bout you, okay? Great, talk to you soon. Buh-bye.”

Christ.

At home, my voicemail was full, fake doctor so and so with the fake emergency, a call from each brother and my father. I called him back.

“Hey, sweetie.”

“Hey, Pop, what's up?”

“I think your Ma is in pretty bad shape.”

“No. I talked to her. She just has bone cancer again.”

“Actually, sweetie,” sighing, “the doctor thinks it's actually something this time. They might need to do surgery to find out what it is. I think John is on his way to the hospital to get some more answers, but stay by the phone tonight, okay?”

My father actually sounded concerned.
Is this real?
I got off the phone and grabbed a beer and paced around my apartment

Is this real? She's dying this time?
All my rage and bitterness toward my mom did its old slow turn on myself, stinging me like a scorpion committing hara-kiri.

Great. Now who's the asshole? She's going into surgery and . . . what if she doesn't wake up? What were my last words to her? Some jackass typical “I don't care about you, Mom, die from whatever you want” comment. Christ. Now she'll die alone, under anesthesia without anybody who cares about her in the slightest, to hold her hand or show her there's something worth waking up for.

When my phone rang again, it was my brother John.

“Hey, Sis.” The familiar gruff voice of my big brother sounded exasperated.

“Hey John, what the fuck . . . ?”

“I went to go see Ma and she's all propped up in a room like a princess. She's fine, she just has a friggin' tummy ache.”

“. . . and bone cancer. Don't forget the bone cancer. I hear it stings.” We both laughed our old callous laugh. “So she's okay?”

“She's
fine
. She just wants attention.” He sounded disgusted. “I'll call you when I hear something, if I hear anything.”

Whipsawed again, like a doll being shaken by a frenzied dog. My temper spiked. “You know what, John? I actually don't think I ever want to know anything about her at all. Unless she's dead, okay? I'm serious. I'm calling Dad and Henry and telling them the same thing. She has yanked us around for the last fucking time.” I told my dad and left Henry a message. “I don't even want to even know if she's in the hospital, or sick or
anything,
ever again. I only want to hear about that woman if she's dead, and I only want to hear it from you guys, a real fucking doctor, a coroner, or a cop, okay? I love you. Good night.”

Angry and smug again I plopped into bed with my sleeping boyfriend, and tried to relax enough to sleep. Somewhere after three-thirty in the morning my phone starts ringing.

I walked through the dark to get the phone.

“Hey, Storm, I'm sorry.” It was my brother Henry. “. . . but, how close to death should she be?”

Gotcha.

M
om had an aneurism. She was in surgery for seven out of the ten hours it took me to get from San Francisco to Boston. She barely made it through the operation and was in a very delicate state when she came out. I couldn't see her until the following morning.

Dad told me that the surgeon had to go pretty deep to get to the aneurism that threatened to stop Mom's heart, and they had to cut one or two major cables to get to it. According to Mom's doctor, she was now paralyzed from the waist down. She would never walk again.

I didn't know what to expect as I pulled up to the hospital. The news that morning was that Mom was recovering. She was still very delicate, drifting in and out of consciousness, but they were allowing family to visit.

Mom finally had something wrong with her, for real. Not terribly
glamorous or exotic; paralysis brought on by a blood clot. Rather common for someone written up in a medical journal for winning the multiple personality lottery.

But this was real. I wondered if she would be happy about being paralyzed, then quickly cursed the thought from my head

She will never walk again, you asshole. She will never be able to skip down a beach or get up to hug someone and she will now, really, have to deal with something fucking difficult and sad, mostly on her own . . . with and without an audience.

Then I saw her.

The small hospital bed she was in looked like an extra small bed for kids, but it still dwarfed her. She seemed so flat and weightless, like the mummified remains of a twelve-year-old boy. Her toothless mouth hung slightly open, her dry lips drooped in over her gums. Her cheeks and eyes deeply sunken around her baby skull. Her skin looked powdered . . . a talc-dusted mummy doll stuck in a hospital bed to play “Operation.”

“Where are your teeth?” I asked the tiny creature that was supposed to be my mom. She didn't answer. She was out cold.

I pulled a chair next to the side of the bed. There was a painful-looking I.V. needle stuck into the tissue-thin meat of her hand. An ugly bruise spread out from under the white tape that held it in place. After years of drugs, smoking, and inactivity, my mom, at fifty-seven, had the flesh of an eighty-year-old, with the stringy veins that come with it. I imagined there had been a ton of poking before the big needle hit pay dirt, so her hand looked beat to shit, lying on the blanket, purple and defeated. I slid my palm under her tiny mangled paw . . . it was cool.