Hollywood Animal (47 page)

“Did something happen?” I asked. “Did you have an argument?”

“No,” he said. “She woke up this morning and never said good morning and hasn’t said anything all day.”

“Is she okay?”

“Her head hurts,” he said. “I saw her put the ice bag on it.”

That night at dinner she was mute. There was a faraway look in her eyes. She served the soup, ate little, and smoked her cigarettes.

My father and I tried to talk to her.

“Did I hurt you somehow, Mária?” my father said. “If I did I’m sorry.”

And: “Please tell us what the matter is, Mária. Please. Whatever it is it will be all right, Mária.”

And: “Don’t do this, Mária, please. Don’t do this to the boy.”

I was sitting at the table, crying.

“Nana,” I said, “what’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong. I’m sorry, Nana. If I did something, I’m sorry. Please, Nana.”

She was stone-faced, unblinking, her jaw set. She didn’t say a word. I fell asleep on my living room couch. For the first time in my life, she didn’t kiss me good night.

I couldn’t focus on anything in school the next day and ran the sixteen blocks home from school.

She was in the kitchen again, a cigarette in her mouth, her face stone, her jaw set.

As I moved to kiss her, she moved away from me. I started to cry and ran for my father in the printing shop. He hugged me.

“She must be sick,” he said. “We’ll try to talk to her tonight.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know,” my father said.

That night at dinner she sat there unblinking, mute, eyes distant again. My father tried again.

“Mária, are you sick? I’ll call the doctor. What’s wrong, Mária? Please, we love you. I love you. The boy loves you.”

He was choking up and started to cry.

“We only have each other, Mária,” he said. “Just the three of us. We have nothing else. Just us.”

And then she suddenly started to laugh. It was a high-pitched and hyena-like sound that I’d never heard before from a human being. It put chills down my back.

My father’s face flushed deep red. He got up and held on to the kitchen table—he had high blood pressure and suffered dizzy spells—and he started to yell at her. “Stop this! This isn’t funny! You think this is funny? Look what you’re doing to the boy!”

I was shaking. I felt tears running down my cheeks.

My mother got up from the table and, her eyes wild, started to scream words at my father. She screamed that he was in love with the woman at the library … that he and the priests were teaching me to be a “pervert” like them … that I was spilling my filthy and smelly seed into the living room couch at night and she had to scrub it away with Ajax every morning … that I had perverted sick pictures in my wallet and … she suddenly threw something she had in her apron pocket onto the kitchen table.

I stared at it, horrified. It was a prophylactic that I had no use for but that I had recently hidden in the fold of my wallet.

My father was yelling back at her. “What is wrong with you? Are you crazy? Have you lost your mind, Mária? How can you say such filth?”

And always the words: “Look at the boy, Mária!
My God, look what you’re doing to the boy!”

I was shaking so hard that I startled myself with my own movements.

Everything in the room was somehow blurry to me.

And then my father collapsed suddenly. He fell onto the linoleum floor, reaching for the table as he fell, then rolled over onto his face.

I was screaming now, screaming for him not to die, atop his body on the floor, trying to roll him over so he could breathe better. His face was ashen, thick sticky drool came out of the side of his mouth. He was taking big gulps of air as I screamed and then the color came back into his face and he was struggling to get up, leaning on me.

My mother stood there watching us, laughing again in that spine-chilling way, a cigarette in her hand, taking fast little puffs on it. I helped my father into the bedroom to lie down and she followed us in.

“Drama!”
she cackled at him in a screeching-high voice. “Drama for the boy! Anything for sympathy!
Liar! Liar!
I believe not a word anymore!
I have heard all the lies! I have seen through all the lies! I know!
I know what you are! Devil!
Devil!”

She was screeching that word in Hungarian:
“Ördög! Ördög!”

I looked at her and caught her eye for a moment and she looked right at me and screamed
“Ördögök”—Devils!
looking for a long moment at the two of us.

She went back to the kitchen and sat at the table, staring hollow-eyed at nothing, chain-smoking her cigarettes.

My father said he was better and needed to rest. I stayed with him until he fell asleep and went to my couch in the living room and tried to sleep. I could hear her out in the kitchen striking matches for her cigarettes.

The next morning my father woke me when it was still dark and told me my mother wanted to go to Mass. We went with her to the seven o’clock Mass at St. Emeric’s.

She said not a word as we walked the sixteen blocks, her jaw set, but my father whispered that she would like it if I could serve the Mass. So when we got to church I asked Father John if I could serve because my parents were there. He looked at me a little strangely but said yes.

I was the only altar boy and I saw my parents were in the front row. I kept craning my neck around all through the Mass to see them—I was afraid my father was going to collapse again and die. I was afraid my mother would start to scream or laugh that terrible laugh.

Father John noticed me craning around and hissed, “What is wrong with you?”

· · ·

My father met me in the sacristy afterward and told me not to worry. He felt fine now, he said, he had just gotten dizzy last night. Everything would be “okay.” He would call a doctor when they got home.

I asked where my mother was and my father said she was still sitting in church. I saw the bags under his eyes and his pallor as he stood in his old trench coat, his beret in his hands. I hugged him close to me.

I felt the tears on his face and he looked at me through his thick, horn-rimmed glasses and with the twinge of a smile said, “It okay, Joe” in English.

I glanced into the dark church from the sacristy and saw my mother sitting in her pew, staring blankly ahead. She was smoking a cigarette. In church. Very calmly. Taking long deep puffs.

When I got home from school, the doctor was there. His name was Michael Varga-Sinka and he had been with us in the refugee camps. He was a friendly man and he was smiling now, talking calmly with my mother, who was screaming at him.

“Why are you with
them?”
my mother screamed.

“Whom, Mária?”

“With
them!”
She pointed to my father and me. “Why are you trying to hurt me?” I saw she was wearing her rosary around her neck.

“I’m trying to help you, Mária,” Dr. Varga-Sinka said. “They’re trying to help you. You’re tired. You need some rest.”

“No!” she said. “You’re trying to put me to sleep so I won’t see their filth. I have to scrub that couch every morning! He puts his seed into it. My own boy! He
sins!”

She went on that way. All the while Varga-Sinka kept talking to her calmly, cajolingly, telling her she needed to rest, trying to persuade her to allow him to give her a shot.

“Please, Nana,” I said. “Let him give it to you. It’s good for you.”

“Why did you join them?” she said to me.
“I loved you, Jozsi.”

She started to cry and so did I and she suddenly put her arm around me and kissed me.

“All right, Jozsi,” she said, “all right.” She held her arm out to the doctor and Varga-Sinka, seizing the moment, plunged the needle in. She fell into a deep sleep within minutes.

“She’ll sleep for a long time,” Varga-Sinka said at our kitchen table. “I think she’s having a mental breakdown.” My father told him about the breakdown she had suffered as a girl in Hungary when her father had advertised in the newspapers for a new wife.

“What can we do?” my father asked.

“I don’t know,” the doctor said, “let’s see how she is in the coming days. This
is
not uncommon. I have had other Hungarian patients, other women who came through the camps and the war that this has happened to. Maybe it’s everything together that causes it—coming to a new country, their fears, abuse, poverty. You two have to stay strong to help her.”

She was still asleep the next morning when I left for school but when I came home that afternoon I could hear her screaming from half a block away.

When I burst through the door, I saw that Dr. Varga-Sinka was there again.

“Take him away, Jozsi,” my mother begged me when she saw me. “Don’t let him poison me. Please.
Don’t let them poison your own mother.”

She was wearing her rosary around her neck again. She didn’t have her false teeth in and the words and kisses she was suddenly showering me with were filled with spittle.

“Don’t be with them, Jozsi,” she said, and her voice suddenly grew harsh.
“Do you want to go to hell? Is that what you want, Jozsi?”
She was yelling at me now. “To burn in hell?
You’re going to burn in hell, you filth!”
and she started to laugh her hyena laugh.

My father moved me quickly out the door and down the stairs while Dr. Varga-Sinka stayed with her.

She had been sleeping peacefully, my father told me downstairs, when he went to the printing shop in the morning. Two hours later, when he went back upstairs to check on her, she was sitting calmly at the kitchen table reading her prayer book.

She had put glue into all of the electrical outlets. She had cut the cords of the radio and the lamps. She had unscrewed all of the lightbulbs and smeared bacon fat into their housings. She had glued all the windows shut with rubber cement. She had broken her false teeth into little bits with a hammer. She had stripped the cover off the couch where I slept and jammed as much of it as she could into the toilet.

We went back upstairs and Varga-Sinka was still trying to calm her. She was ranting about rays coming out of the electrical outlets, poisoning her, torturing her.
They
were trying to kill her, to poison her, to drive her crazy.
They
were putting thoughts into her head.
They
were watching her—when she went to the bathroom even, when she wiped herself,
they
were laughing because she smelled so bad.

We were back at the kitchen table with Dr. Varga-Sinka, who had given my mother another shot.

“She’s very ill,” he said, “she’s ill not in her body but in her mind. I’m not a psychiatrist. She needs a psychiatrist. This is paranoia, this business with the rays, the watching. She’s always been such a shy woman.”

“Who can we go to?” my father said.

Varga-Sinka said there were no Hungarian psychiatrists in Cleveland; he would find the name of an American one.

“An American?” my father said. “She can hardly speak any English. How can she be helped by someone who doesn’t understand her?”

“I don’t know, Steve,” Dr. Varga-Sinka said. “But we have to try.” He left some pills for her to take and when my mother woke up the next day the first thing she did was flush them down the toilet.

She wasn’t going to see any other doctors, she said. She wasn’t going to tell anyone else that she smelled bad when she wiped herself. Besides, all the doctors were in cahoots with my father and me.

For about a month or so she became mute again. She continued cooking our meals but wouldn’t speak or respond to us.

I kept repeating to myself what my father kept repeating to me: that I mustn’t take her actions personally, that my mother loved me and was sick.

But it was hard to believe it. She was
so
cold,
so
distant.

I stopped trying to kiss her when I came back from school.

One morning I woke up and she was staring at me, the ice-towel around her head. The crucifix which my parents kept on their bedroom wall was in her hand and she was pointing it at me.

I looked up at her and smiled tentatively and said, “Hi, Nana.”

She hissed, “Clean yourself!
Clean yourself of your filth!
” and backed away from the couch, still pointing the crucifix at me.

Then she did it again: rubber-cemented the windows, cut the cords to the electric outlets, bacon-fatted the lightbulb housings. This time she even took our old Philips shortwave and hammered it into bits.

She refused to have new false teeth made because she said the teeth were “receptors for the transmitting rays.”

And then, suddenly, unbelievably, miraculously, she was her old self. Affectionate, loving, warm.

Yes, she said, she had been sick but now she was fine and she loved me so much, she said, and I was growing up to be such a big boy … and the next day she was mute again … and the following week she was cutting the cords again … and the week after that she was her old self again.

In the beginning I prayed to God at night to make her well, because I missed my mother so awfully much, but after a while I just prayed for day-to-day improvement.
Please, God, don’t let her be silent today, please, God, don’t let her cut the cords tomorrow
.

I started doing screwy things, knowing they were screwy even as I did them: I waited for Tuesdays because St. Anthony of Padua was her favorite saint and she
had
dedicated Tuesdays to St. Anthony and the chart I kept of her behavior showed me that she had never cut cords on a Tuesday.

And I rolled my dice at night sometimes to tell me how she’d be the next day: doubles meant she’d be better the next day; snake eyes meant we’d have to call the doctor again.

I tried to stay off the playgrounds and the alleys and tried not to touch myself at night. I feared that she was listening to every rustle of my couch and I felt guilty about touching myself. In some part of me there was a nagging and paralyzing fear that I had
caused
my mother’s illness, that my nighttime seed spillings had somehow
driven
her into this madness.