Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (37 page)

Toughness comes in all forms. For me, at times, it would have to be enough just to survive. In fact, my only defense against an addict who threatened to beat me up if I didn’t get the psychiatrist to write a prescription for him was to sit still and wait for him to exhaust himself with his own ranting. Maybe this wasn’t the most proactive of philosophies, but it kept me from being slugged.

Later that year, after my partner told me about the two camps arguing over my being hired, the man who led the opposition camp was assaulted by an aggressive patient. Apparently, he had first shoved the patient against a wall. From this I learned: a) never doubt myself, especially when someone else is eager to do it for me; and b) when it comes to working with violent patients, I’ll take mental stamina over physical brawn any day.

One of the perks of working long hours was that I could take long vacations. Over a couple of years I traveled to Guatemala and Honduras, Greece and Turkey, Mexico, and twice I drove across country.

I also developed a network of friends to replace some of the friends I’d lost contact with after my divorce. By now Claire was living in Atlanta with her husband. Her two kids were in elementary school. I was just beginning to date again, but mostly I slummed with Geila or my other best friend, Jackson, a senior chess master. I’d met him through an old roommate, who played on Jackson’s chess team. Because we’re the same age, Jackson and I connected on pop hits from the seventies. When he ran out of things to say, he would sing in his nasally voice, “Betcha by Golly Wow,” to which I would say, “Sixth grade.”

Like me, Jackson had an unusual youth. At sixteen he’d been accepted to Princeton; however, he was so obsessed with chess that he couldn’t break away from games to attend classes. Now in his thirties, he spent upward of forty-eight continuous hours playing chess online with masters and grandmasters in Russia. I’d barely heard of the Internet, and Jackson spent half of his life on it. He’d given up a great job for these bonanza chess matches, and it took three years for him to get around to looking for another job. For those three years, outside of his chess games, he was always free to catch a movie or to get a bite to eat, and he never ran out of money. On the floorboard of his one extravagance, a red Ford Fiesta—into which he fit his six-and-a-half-foot body like a Jackson-in-the-box—I’d find paychecks, never deposited, from his previous job. Later, his fiancée collected several thousand dollars in old paychecks just by cleaning his apartment. “And to think,” I said, “we could have opened your glove box, cashed a check at a drive-thru, and taken off for Mexico.”

Jackson’s mother adopted me for holidays. The tradition began with my job on the emergency service. I had to work every holiday in my first year, so Jackson brought his mother’s Thanksgiving dinner to me.

Now, on this snowy Christmas, Jackson met me at an all-night diner after I left work at midnight. As soon as we took our booth, I said, “I hate Christmas, and I hate men.”

“Hmm,” said Jackson, who was never offended by my swipes at men. He was more interested in the songs on the jukebox, and in food. He turned to the menu. On several occasions, I’d watched Jackson consume bushels of food in a single sitting. “Didn’t you just eat a huge Christmas dinner?” I said.

He patted his stomach. “Define huge.”

“You’re lucky you’re so tall. I’m just hoping my thyroid holds out. I’m thirty-three!”

“Thirty-three,” he said, looking up from the menu, “the age of Jesus at death.”

“Thank you, Jackson.”

“Things could be worse, you know.” Then he did a poor imitation of a Monty Python character singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

He ordered something from both the breakfast and the lunch menus—because he’d “saved up” that day for Christmas dinner. I watched him eat both meals before he finished off my fries, which was hilarious in light of our last outing, when, after he’d watched me eat a baked potato, he asked, “Should I call in the People for the Ethical Treatment of Potato Skins?”

We left at three in the morning. I drove down an almost desolate Connecticut Avenue and pulled my new white Rabbit into an empty spot next to a snowbank. With no traffic, the only person in sight was a woman in a white uniform shivering at the bus stop across the street from me. I climbed out of my car and was trying to figure out how to get over the two-foot embankment when a sedan raced south on Connecticut, stopped suddenly, then pulled into the side street next to the woman. A car door opened. The light came on inside it, and I saw three men. One man leapt out and dragged the woman toward the car. I stood on my side of the street and watched, helpless. There were no lights coming from the apartment buildings lining either side of the street. This was before cell phones. The woman fought to get into the middle of Connecticut Avenue. Maybe she was hoping for a car to come along. The man reached for her with both hands now. She tried to twist from his grip and reach out at the same time. I realized that she was reaching toward me. I was two lanes away from her, where I waited, waving her to keep coming. Finally, she freed one arm. The man started to reach for something inside his coat. But he looked out to where she was heading, saw me, the unexpected witness, and let go of her. She raced over to me and we hugged. The man climbed back in the car, which zoomed away. This stranger and I were left alone, clinging to each other.

“Was that your husband?” I asked.

“You jokin’, right?” She took a minute to gather her breath. “That man was a kidnapper.”

I’d become so jaded about marriage. Now the idea of it made me burst out laughing, and she looked at me as if I were creepier than the kidnapper. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Just forget it.”

She told me that she had just gotten off work and had only seven dollars in her purse. When she had revealed that to a cab driver, he refused to take her down to Southeast, DC, which was why she’d been waiting for a bus. “You saved my life,” she said. I think we both understood that because I was white, I had been spared. Those men assumed that no one would look very hard for the kidnapper of a black domestic worker. We went to my apartment. I called a taxi and gave her money for fare. Downstairs we hugged again before she climbed into the cab that took her home.

For a moment I stood at the curb and took in the scene: a pitch-black sky and Connecticut Avenue covered in snow. I went upstairs and climbed into bed. For some reason I slept soundly that night.

E
nough drama, I decided. Shortly after the holidays, I took a break from studying for the licensing exam. Now, without a book to study in my spare time, I started ushering for the Shakespeare Theatre, I went to hypnosis workshops, and I hired a tutor to give me Spanish lessons. That spring I went to Mexico City to meet the family of a man who had read my newspaper article while studying at the University of Minnesota. His brother had been born with partial arms because of thalidomide. The three of us had been writing and visiting each other for five years. Now their parents welcomed me into their home and gave me a biography of Frida Kahlo, in Spanish. Then they took me to her home, La Casa Azul, to which I would return twice more. Frida had expressed herself in words as well as in her paintings. Her diary includes small sketches and paintings, as well as remarkable statements about her life. La Casa Azul seemed to me a painted diary that opened itself to the world. My visit reminded me of what I had lost: my writing. Frida Kahlo’s paintings drew me in, but her words described my life:

“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.”

“The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”

“I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.”

“My painting carries with it the message of pain.”

“Painting completed my life.”

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

From Mexico City I traveled alone to Puerto Escondido, where I met two women who had driven from Los Angeles in a Volkswagen camper. We watched the sunset from the beach while the camper’s stereo played Astrud Gilberto’s “The Girl from Ipanema.” The camper and the song brought me back to the days when Frankie and I played for hours in a camper while Mom and Dad listened to “Bittersweet Samba.” If I was ever going to be free of mental torment, I would have to recast my childhood memories, sort of like painting the same picture but using different colors, or composing new music to go with old lyrics.

I’ve long since forgotten the names of the women I met in Puerto Escondido, but now when I hear “The Girl from Ipanema,” I see the inside of a Volkswagen camper.

I
can easily go back to the brick hearth in our den, where as a child I rummaged through the bookshelves, dreaming of the day I’d become a reader while others became walkers, runners, and bicyclists. At first, I pretended to read the books to Ted, making up the stories as I went along. Finally I became a reader, and those titles gave me a place inside a collective experience, which made me eager to catch up with my older siblings. Every book an older sibling read became something to strive for myself. Our paperback copy of
The Sun Also Rises
was curled at the corner of the cover from so many readers. I worried that corner until it ripped away.
L’Etranger
inspired me to choose French in high school, and once I understood its meaning, the title filled me with ennui. Beckoning from the center of the right-hand bookshelf, Mom’s book
The Heart of the Matter
piqued my curiosity: heart of what matter?

The image of my siblings in a full house starts here by the hearth also. In this room after dinner we held “flying contests.” Without legs, I was the most sought-after flying partner. The older kids would lie on their backs and propel the middle children with their feet. Because I could balance my abbreviated body on a foot so neatly, Michael and Rosa fought over me. Rosa always lured me to her team by promising to give me a perm. She’d lower me into a “one-foot kiss,” or fasten my armpits over her heels and swing me between her legs for the “belle of the ball.” Beside us Frankie, with a wad of Mom’s stew in his jaw, balanced on Michael’s feet while Michael ordered him to swallow and Rosa ordered him to spit it out. Eventually the other middle children grew too big to play, while my short body lasted until well into elementary school. I was still competing when Matthew started as a toddler. It was Tim, the agile acrobat, who forced me off the circuit. Liz wrapped a scarf around his head and secured it with an oval brooch, making it into a turban while he was still in diapers. She called him “Louie, the Great Zambini,” cuing him with two claps before he raced into a dazzling flip twist. They were an unbeatable team.

During that window of time when I could still fly but I was old enough to read, I’d focus on the magenta crowns embossed on the binding of
The Little Prince
and imagine that Rosa’s musty feet, clad in cable-knit socks and digging into my ribcage, were a magic carpet
.
Only from above her feet could I spot that strange title sequestered behind the television set:
The Man Without a Country.
The idea behind those words made me contemplate an unknown world, and the distraction might cause me to lose my focus and topple from Rosa’s feet with my head aimed at the brick hearth containing a roaring fire, or to soar and twirl in feats of acrobatic finesse.

When I remember who I am and where I come from, I see myself flying in our den beside those books, wearing my Saint Vivian uniform and no legs, my stomach aching from gnarled toes poking into my ribs, my brothers and sisters competing, our parents sharing stories and drinks with our grandparents out on the screened-in porch, and “Bittersweet Samba” on the stereo in the living room.

Brazilian jazz tunes set the beat to my sixties childhood, just as those book titles in our den colored my imagination with their philosophical refrain. All I needed now was to fall in love with a poet in Brazil.

CHAPTER 25

Dancing with Andy

A
fter nearly two years in the jail and the emergency service, I was finally accepted onto the adolescent team. It had taken three tries and a growing camp of supporters, which included the two people who had been hired over me. When I announced I was leaving the emergency service, the director cried and I had to stay another six months because I had become “essential personnel.” Before starting my new job, I moved to Arlington, Virginia, having found out that my crank caller was not a released detainee but a man in my apartment building on Connecticut Avenue. By the time I was reunited with adolescents, I was almost a grownup myself. I was thirty-four.

That fall, I met Andy. We were both guests at Geila’s fundraiser for a congressional candidate from Cincinnati. Our candidate lost but Andy and I became friends, which we stayed for more than a year. Then we fell in love.

Andy was in DC on a fellowship with the US Information Agency and, after a couple extensions, his time had run out. He would have to return to his job teaching literature at, of all places, Miami University, a school just thirty minutes from Cincinnati. We worried that the odds of finding a tenure-track position in Washington DC for his specialty, American modernist literature, were close to nil. We were only months into our romance when he was invited to teach for a semester in Brazil. He took the job. This would buy him time to apply for permanent positions.

“It’s only for a semester,” he said at the airport before a convincing kiss. Still, I wondered if I’d ever see him again as I pulled out of National Airport in my blue Miata, a magnificent car that was all wrong for me. I’d crashed it into a pole, and even Andy, who had never so much as dented a car before, bashed it into another pole while backing out of a tight spot in my garage. Then, just before I took him to the airport, he’d accidentally pushed his suitcase through the plastic window in the rear of the convertible top. Driving home on the G. W. Parkway, I tried not to imagine why he’d become the clumsiest man on the planet just as he was leaving town. March winds rattled my diminutive car from inside out, heaving through the fresh hole in my rear window, which now made the dents on either side of my car feel like two black eyes. I had never been so happy and so at peace with a man. Now I had to ask myself, “Why would he come back here?” We both knew that he’d have to go wherever he found a job.