Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (36 page)

I studied Geila across the table while we ate my anniversary cake. Despite her tiny build, Geila was anything but elfin. She had a lion’s mane of black curls and her eyes held “a glint of gypsy,” as she would say. I was trying to decide whether to ask her advice on how to leave my marriage. Mounted on the wall above her head was a painting she called
Freudian Dream
, in which a naked seductress lounged next to a staid Victorian couple. It was something two women from the Midwest might understand instinctively. I laid out my problem.

“What are these obstacles you keep mentioning?” Geila prodded, already listening like a lawyer, making careful note, yet occasionally eyeing the paper she needed to finish for school.

“If I leave Tom my family will disown me,” I said.

She burst out laughing. “Next?”

“Come on.”

“Well, it isn’t as if you’re alone,” she said. She pointed to a number of people who would help me. Topping the list was an older woman in my neighborhood who was also in recovery. She provided the perfect antidote to Geila’s sometimes “goon-squad” tactical coaching. For just about any conflict in which Geila perceived the other party to be a bully, she typically advised the threat of a lawsuit, if not a stream of vulgar insults, whereas my older neighbor would say in her soft voice, “Now, if so and so says something insensitive, you might just say, ‘That’s very interesting,’ and ‘I’m afraid I have to go now.’”

“Really?” I’d once said to my neighbor on the phone. I couldn’t believe this from a woman with a Washington-insider type of job. “That’s it? I mean, no offense, but isn’t that a bit wimpy?”

Silence on the line.

“Hello?”

“That’s very interesting,” she said, “but I’m afraid I have to go now.”

Ouch, I’d thought, that’s rough.

Where would I be without the women who had supported me? What might I have become if not for Claire and Gretchen, or my roommates in Boston, or these women in DC? In my life so far, I’d relied too often on men.

“But I want children,” I said to Geila.

She rolled her eyes. Geila had already raised a niece whom she considered a daughter. Her maternal instincts were satisfied, whereas mine had intensified into a near-physical pain. “You can always adopt, if you can’t find the right wanker to marry,” she said. Having once lived in England, Geila used “wanker” as a staple in her vocabulary.

“Okay,” I conceded. We knew single women who had adopted. They seemed happy.

Money was another issue. Or was it? A few days earlier I’d been offered a solution. I was folding laundry with Oprah Winfrey on the television. I hadn’t watched daytime television since the days when Colette and I asked each other, “Why is Laura dating Luke after he raped her?” Now Oprah told her audience, “If a man hits you, it means he doesn’t like you.” The phone rang, and my old boss was calling me to come back to work. “I’ll think about it,” I’d said.

Now I pointed out to Geila, “I have fifty dollars in my checking account and three more years of graduate school to finance on a part-time job.”

“Well,” she said, unimpressed, “when you’re ready to go, you’ll go.”

“Ridiculous,” I thought. “There is no way I’m trading in my life to live on scraps. I own a house. I could be a mother soon.”

After dinner we watched a movie: Meryl Streep lost her baby to a dingo in the Australian outback. Geila threw up her hands and said, “I gotta go finish my paper,” and moved to her study. Twenty minutes later she was back. “What’s happening now?”

I held up a stuffed animal and said, “The dango got me baby.”

That night I slept on Geila’s sofa under
Freudian Dream
. I might have had only fifty dollars in my checking account, and the dingo had my baby, but rehab would always hold a job for me. I never went home after that night.

CHAPTER 24

Wings to Fly

T
he most obvious lessons have always been the hardest for me to learn. The following winter, I went to Cincinnati for the Christmas holidays and managed to embroil myself in a family squabble over a bûche de Noël. I’d brought along a vintage cookbook organized by theme parties from cities around the world, such as “Hungarian Brunch for Six.” A new world awaited me as I finally taught myself how to cook. So far I’d made the cream of carrot soup, the veal pâté
,
and the walnut soufflé. Because I had no children to bring to the Christmas Eve party, I figured at least I could offer this French cake.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, Mom walked into the kitchen, hands on her hips, and said, “You’re not messing up my kitchen. Besides, those grandkids won’t have anything to do with fancy food. You would know that if you ... Oh, forget it. Just get out of my kitchen.”

If only I had executed my neighbor’s plan: “That’s very interesting ...” Instead I told my mother to fuck off. None of us had ever spoken those words to her. Mom and I stood there staring at each other in shock before we escalated to a near-violent screaming match. If we hadn’t been so serious, it might have made good material for a screwball comedy. Instead, I realized it was time to go. I packed up and spent Christmas with friends.

Later that week I visited Aunt Gert, who was battling lung cancer for the second time. Because of chemo, she wore a wig, which contrasted oddly with the clown’s wig she’d once worn in a variety show.

“Persistent little dickens, you were,” she said as we drank coffee at her kitchen table. “Remember that time you stayed with us? You must have been three or four.”

“The Michigan trip.”

“You kept trying to put Sally’s sneakers on your legs.”

“Really? I sort of remember that. Were they Keds?” A jolt of pain ran from the tip of my leg, where there had once been something like a toe, to the top of my spine. “Did I try to stand up in that shoe?”

“You tried it this way and that. You tried everything, and I hated to tell you it would never work, but someone had to. You didn’t want to hear it, though.”

Then she managed to slip this in: “You know, Eileen, marriages are like kits. You have to keep working on them. They don’t come together by themselves.” After that she shook her head and whistled through her overbite: “You’ll figure things out.”

I doubted that. But as I drove away, I wondered if she had been talking about something other than my failed marriage.

Before I left town, I spent the night at Ted’s house down by the river. He had moved back to Cincinnati to finish his doctorate. On my last morning in town, Ted and I drank coffee in his kitchen. He twirled the hair behind his right ear nervously while I rehashed the argument with Mom. The phone rang. Ted picked it up, and his eyes expanded with horror. Even though I was about ten feet from the phone, I could hear my oldest sister’s voice on the line. Bridget was sobbing when Ted handed me the receiver. My voice tentative, I said, “Hello?”

I couldn’t make out her words at first because she was shouting through tears. I said, “Bridget?”

She ordered me to stay away from “my mother.” Then she repeated her message in every way imaginable.

Why was she calling me now from Mom’s house, when it had been several days since Mom and I had argued? I couldn’t be certain, but I guessed that Mom had started pacing and complaining of being a nervous wreck. That would have been enough to turn Bridget into the mama bear. While her actions were understandable, Bridget was doing to me what had been done so many times that I needed to consider whether I could have a relationship with this family. No one ever wanted to hear my side of any story.

It was true that Mom and I had complex issues between us. The only thing I imagined might help our relationship would have been an intervention from a therapist, except for this glitch: Mom hated therapy. She chided me for my patronizing psychobabble, and there was truth to her claim. If I’d proposed an intervention, Mom would probably have said, “That’s right ... call in the therapists because they know soooo much more than the rest of us. Just look at how well therapy has helped you.” But the main reason I couldn’t bring the idea up was that she’d made it clear to me that she had “no guilt whatsoever” about my birth defects. She had nothing to discuss. If I tried to explain that my complaint was about her handling of my birth defects, not that she had
caused
the defects themselves, she would only raise her voice, “No guilt!” Then she would start pacing, and that would send a message to some of my siblings to tighten the defense, keep that Snarleen away from their mother.

As for her own treatment, Mom had seen the same psychiatrist on and off for years for medication alone. She took it until she stabilized. After that, she functioned rather well. Why would she want to upset herself in therapy over this thalidomide conundrum? Even if she might have considered an intervention, my siblings would have advised her not to participate because it would upset her. This was my problem, not hers, not theirs.

Bridget was running out of ways to tell me to stay away from her mother. This was my chance to politely excuse myself from the call, but I screamed back at her, “Okay! I’ll stay away from
your
mother.” Then I hung up and went straight to my car.

Ted followed close behind. “You shouldn’t drive right now. You’re too upset.”

“I’m fine,” I said, fighting tears. We hugged. I peeled out of the alley behind his house, weeping until I met snow flurries outside of Columbus. There were mountains to the east, and driving through them at night in the snow would be treacherous. I pushed on, even sped up where possible, and miraculously the skies were clear through the Alleghenies. Everything up ahead promised a better day. Bridget was right, I decided. This was her mother, their mother, not mine. Thalidomide had severed the umbilical cord between Mom and me. I realized then that I had done the right thing in moving away. When I left at twenty-one, I didn’t know that I was making a choice between self-respect and having my family. If I had realized that my choices had come down to that, I might have stayed in Cincinnati. Within years or even months, I might have swallowed more pills after some drunken mishap. My naïveté had saved me. Finally, with relief, I neared my home in DC.

F
our years later, in 1993, there was snow on Christmas in DC. I called it the Winter of Ice. I’d moved uptown only a year before, and already I was looking for my next home. From my apartment on Connecticut Avenue, I watched gray-haired men and women being wheeled around by black women in white uniforms.
Schindler’s List
played at the Avalon near Chevy Chase Circle. The Holocaust Museum opened near the National Mall. I’d reached the end of school and of a youth that I was both celebrating and mourning.

My first job was divided into the two most challenging places to work in the mental health system: a twenty-four-hour emergency service and a jail. I was either sitting with a potentially suicidal patient at midnight, driving to the scene of a domestic squabble that could lead to violence, or talking through bars to a detainee, who might have stolen a carton of cigarettes or beaten a child to death with a baseball bat. The work fascinated me, but it also brought me my first silver hairs. In my spare time, I was studying for the national licensing exam in clinical psychology. I lived alone, and I was getting crank calls from a creepy man who was asking for me by name. My insomnia escalated as I worried that he was someone who had been released from the jail.

I was tired and cranky when I unwittingly prompted my Mobile Crisis partner to tell me about the “two camps” that apparently existed within the emergency service. We were driving to the home of a couple in the throes of a violent argument. At first we talked about the time a suicidal man pulled a gun on our mentors, Kenny and Brad, on one of their Mobile Crisis calls. Because of the way Kenny always told the story, we were laughing. He’d say that Brad had grabbed a pillow from the sofa to shield himself from a potential bullet at close range, while he, Kenny, talked the man into putting the gun down. It had ended as well as could be expected. The man gave up his gun and went into a hospital for treatment. What made the story funny to me was that Kenny looked like Kenny Rogers, the Silver Fox, and every time I heard it, I thought of “The Gambler.”
Know when to fold ’em
...

To survive this kind of work, you had to distance yourself from the violence while at the same time be thinking through a strategy to defuse it. We had two weapons: to not be surprised by our own and each other’s failings; and to believe in each other as a team.

At the end of the story I said, “Some people on the staff still treat me as if I were a first-year student. It’s kind of hard to do my job under those conditions.”

My partner’s jaw tightened as he drove. “Eileen,” he said, “you don’t know the half of it. Before you were hired, there was a battle between two camps. One camp said the job was too dangerous. Another fought to hire you.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I need this like I need a kick in the teeth.” By now I’d been through this game so often that I vacillated between feelings of bitterness and utter defeat. I’d been trying to get hired onto the adolescent team, my favorite population to work with and the age group on which most of my clinical training had been focused, but a colleague from that team had told me, after I was passed over, that the team leader expressed “concern” over a woman without legs working with traumatized children.

As for doing emergency work under the skeptical eyes of a few peers, I was fortunate to have learned to drive with a mother who gripped her door and pumped an invisible brake from the passenger seat. I could teach myself to be a competent professional, if necessary, even if some of my coworkers were convinced I would fail. I had to focus on the coworkers who had a healthy balance of humor and seriousness toward their job, people like Kenny and Brad. They seemed to believe in me and, as far as I knew, they had never been assaulted by a patient.

When I called Ted for advice, he said, “Sometimes you have to slam the door on your way out of a room and not look back. If anyone gets their fingers caught, tough, that’s their problem.”