Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (9 page)

As for me, no one would say the words but I suspected that there would be no boy waiting in the prayer chair for me, and that could only mean that I was headed for the convent.

Secretly, I longed to become a ballerina. I’d dreamed of being one since Aunt Gert’s costar danced in a gold-sequined pantsuit at Saint Vivian’s variety show. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say, “Ballerina,” until I learned to read faces. Once I saw my grandmother’s impenetrable face go slack, I added, “Or a missionary nun in Africa.”

The aspect of Catholicism which obsessed me was miracle stories. Frankie nurtured that hope by parting with his baseball books temporarily and choosing instead books on saints from Saint Vivian’s library. At night, under the tent of his plaid bedspread, he’d read to me about stoning, starvation, degradation, and burning at the stake. When Frankie saw a picture of the shrine at Lourdes, he pointed excitedly. “That’s where we’re going. If you drink water from the well, you’ll get a pair of legs.” We imagined the miracle to come: a sky opening up to a magnificent light and wonder-filled faces surrounding me as my legs transformed. There were three things I would do immediately: I would run; I would ride a bicycle; and I would leap in a series of grand jetés. The only problem was how to get to Lourdes.

When Lent arrived that year, our neighbor, a Girl Scout leader, said she was taking her daughter and Liz to the shrine in Mount Adams on Good Friday. They went every year. Frank decided that the shrine in Mount Adams might be a reasonable substitute for Lourdes. We begged to be included, and our neighbor agreed to take us. At the shrine, you were expected to say a rosary while climbing an enormous staircase to its plaza. The idea was that you said a Hail Mary on each step and an Our Father on every tenth step. At the top, you were to kiss the feet of Christ, and we thought this would be Jesus himself.

From my bed in the crib, I imagined my lips pressed to a suffering man’s flesh. “I can’t do that,” I said.

“You want legs?” Frankie asked.

Did I want them that much?

On the morning of Good Friday we eyed the stone church on the hill. The tip of a life-sized crucifix hovered above a mob in its courtyard. I cringed with every step. Momentarily I forgot why we were there, and I marveled at the hills dotted by shotgun houses. Rosaries lacing their hands, a string of Catholics formed a line several blocks long. “He’s really up there?” I asked Frank.

“You don’t believe, do you?”

“So it’ll work?”

“Lear.” He shook his head. His expression told me, “We’ve gone over this.”

I was getting angry now. To think that Mom and Dad had let me go on this long without legs when all it took was a drive across town on Good Friday, a few prayers, and a kiss? “Why didn’t we do this before?”

He shrugged.

I bit my lip. My faith was weak. If Frankie were the one without legs, he would surely be the one awarded a miracle.

When we reached the top, I had to shield my eyes against the sun to get a good look at the crucifix. I halfway hoped Jesus wasn’t alive and suffering, even if that meant I couldn’t have legs. “It’s not him,” I said to Frank.

“Go on, Eileen,” said our neighbor, and she nudged the back of my neck. “It’s your turn.” I closed my eyes, and Frankie gave me a gentle shove. I kneeled to kiss the feet, but they were only cold porcelain. Nothing changed. Frank finally led me away.

“Maybe it takes a while,” he said, on the drive home.

“Shut up,” I told him. Staring out the window, I was looking for someone with whom I could lodge my complaint.

CHAPTER 7

An Education

S
econd grade, the year of great expectations: I could finally go to Saint Vivian. In the spring I would make my First Holy Communion. Simultaneously I was shifted from Frankie’s bedroom into Liz’s, where I now had a real bed and a sister to share my nighttime stories. Mom was pregnant with her eleventh baby. The tenth baby was a boy, Tim, and so were the eighth and ninth children, Ted and Matthew. As I saw it, we were
owed
a baby girl.

New obstacles threatened my expectations, though. Transportation to school posed the first. Since the bus for Saint Vivian did not come by our house, Mom signed me up for a county van that shuttled mentally retarded adults to a sheltered workshop. A woman with Down Syndrome would ask me daily, “Eileen, are you retarded?” I would blush and say, “I don’t think so.” I always kept my cheek pressed to the window while chiding myself for thinking I was better than her. At the same time I would be praying to slip from the van unnoticed. Inevitably, as we pulled into Saint Vivian’s parking lot some kid would yell, “Retarded bus!”

Coming off of the “retarded bus” was bad PR at any school.

People would tell me that no one saw me any differently, but I knew that only
some
people saw me as the same. My job would be to find those people. At school I would learn precisely how far my neighborhood friends’ loyalties stretched: they would choose me
not last
for a team sport but second-to-last, which left me feeling both grateful and betrayed.

Saint Vivian was a machine for churning out athletes. The parents here valued three things in an education, in this order: athleticism, devotion to the Church, arithmetic. Even as young as the second grade, the girls shortened their pleated skirts by rolling the waistband. They tied their blazers over the bulge so the nuns wouldn’t notice; their knee socks were scrunched down to anklets so they’d be ready to kick ass; and they wore a look in their eyes that said, “Wanna bet?” They played kickball and softball in the rain, in the snow, and possibly in their sleep. Often I ended up playing hopscotch with the other girls who’d been picked last because no one noticed when we abandoned the outfield.

Now that I was in a twin bed in Liz’s room, I’d lost Frankie’s coaching and the drone of his RBI calculations at night. I couldn’t sleep, and Liz wasn’t a talker. She was the quintessential Saint Vivian girl: athlete, cheerleader. And I was on the retarded bus. I worried that she was embarrassed by me. I was embarrassed by me.

The tension between us wasn’t helped by this new arrangement of bedrooms. Liz was eager for Bridget to go to college so she could move in with Rosa, but that was a year away. In the meantime she was stuck with me. Already I had awakened with the flu one morning and threw up on her brand-new turntable, so Mom stuck the turntable in its case in the bathtub to wash it. “See, it’s all better,” she’d said to Liz, who narrowed her eyes at me before turning away in disgust.

Then came the winter morning when we awakened to the news that Mom was in the hospital. She had slipped on the icy staircase after six o’clock Mass and broken her leg. It seemed as if she would never come home. When she arrived finally, I latched back onto her, sobbing inconsolably on the nights Dad took her out to dinner.

Within weeks Mom was gone again. This time she delivered a girl, Nina, who came with a shock of black hair and smelled like the peach pie that Shirley baked. Shirley, who had revived Matthew when he almost suffocated in the car, was now staying with us. Her stay had been extended since the doctors had kept Mom in the hospital after some complications. Strangely enough, the baby came home with Dad. I missed Mom but I was so in love with our baby girl that I hardly noticed. “Now, don’t lick her cheeks,” Shirley would say. “Give that child space to breathe.”

Finally news trickled down to us younger children that our mother wasn’t bouncing back this time. When she came home from the hospital, Mom peered out from her white coverlet like a grounded bird who’d forgotten how to fly. She stayed in bed by day and paced at night. Her hair flat and skin yellow, she reeked of cigarette smoke and a stale odor that I came to know as a smell worked up from the mere effort to stay alive.

At night, Shirley went home to her own huge family as soon as Dad stepped through the back door. To help out, Candy came more often to clean. Since the oldest children became parent substitutes, Rosa was assigned to bath duty. Each night Frankie, Ted, and I went to bed with the notion that by emptying the tub we’d drowned an imaginary boy, Jimmy Quigsley, who, according to Rosa, lived in the drain. Meanwhile our mother prayed and paced outside our doors. I’d call to Frankie from my new bed in Liz’s room, but he’d have fallen asleep. I’d turn to Liz who, without opening her eyes, would say, “I’m asleep.”

One morning, Bridget stood in my doorway. “Mom’s in the hospital again,” she said. “You’ll have to put your own legs on today.”

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, but Bridget was already gone. I turned to Liz. Her bed was already vacated.

Somehow we children had slept through the previous night while our mother was taken by ambulance, against her will, to the hospital. I picked up on what had happened by listening from under the kitchen table to adult conversations. Eventually I would hear Mom’s account, and I would see for myself what she was like during a later episode. Based on everything I heard about my mother’s mental state on that night and based on what I would learn about psychosis and mania, I imagine the night unfolding this way:

Days after she has the baby, Joy is still only able to doze in brief spurts. One night she wakes panicked, feeling as if her body will forget how to breathe if she gives in to sleep. It’s an early summer night. Her pale pink nightgown is pasted to her back and chest with sweat. Everything is musty; her skin is oily. She throws off her sheet. If she could throw off her flesh, she would d
o it.

Everyone’s in bed, except Dick, who’s still reading his
Time
magazine downstairs. Instead of pacing with her rosary, Joy goes to the window that overlooks the neighbors’ backyards. The yard to the left used to be a nursery. Because it has a deep pond and a swimming pool, it is fenced off. Right now it seems like a sanctuary. A weeping willow dips into the pond; pines darken most of the
land.

In the breeze at the window, Joy peels her nightgown away from her skin. Her breath is short. She draws in a deeper breath, but it all feels lab
ored.

Then she hears God’s voice. She’s never heard Him before, and she can’t quite trust that it’s real. But if Mary has visited Joy’s mother, why shouldn’t God visit
Joy?

Or maybe this is the D
evil?

God senses that she doesn’t believe Him. He tells her that she has to prove her devotion by going next door and jumping in the pond. But she can’t swim. She tells Him that, and he says that it is because she can’t swim that she has to try. She has to prove her devotion to
Him.

Re
ally?

Or is this the Devil talk
ing?

Now God wants to know why she questions Him. Doesn’t she know that He’s always protected
her?

Yes, she does know that. But He doesn’t believe her, and if she wants Him to believe her she has to go to the
pond.

She wrestles with this voice until she’s so confused she can’t think. It looks cool by the pond. She dashes from her room and down the hall, then the stairs, bare feet slapping the slate in the front hall, silk fluttering as she passes Dick in the kit
chen.

“Why are you up?” asks Dick, glancing over his magazine. From across the kitchen he smells her musty odor. She hasn’t slept because of her praying. He’d assumed this would pass, but she’s not the same this time. “
Joy?”

She doesn’t answer
him.

“
Joy!”

She passes him, racing toward the back door. He jerks up from his chair, and it scrapes the floor. “Stop!” He chases after her, reaches out and catches only her nightgown, but the damp silk ripples through his fingers. She tugs free. Her hand is on the doorknob, and she’s talking gibberish in something like Latin. Her mouth is working so furiously that it’s foaming. Her free arm is batting him away, flapping like a crow, while he’s trying to hold her. In between the gibberish, she’s saying, “I can’t swi
m
...
I believe you. I do!” Then she’s crying, saying, “All right. All right. I’ll go. I’m going. But will you save
me?”

“Be still, Joy! Save you from w
hat?”

She pulls open the door and pushes the screen door
next.

“Where do you think you’re go
ing?”

“I told you I would do it. I’m going. I’m going to the p
ond.”

He starts to ask why, but he knows she’ll drown if he lets her go. He has no choice but to tackle her; she fights him as if he were trying to strangle her. He’s dragged her back to just inside the door, and now he has to sit on her to keep her down. She’s pushing into his chest. She says she can’t breathe, and he almost gets up but then she hisses, “Ssstop it, you devil! Get off of
me!”

“That’s not right,” he says. “What’s gotten into you? Joy?” He needs to drag her to the phone so he can call for help. Jack Campbell is across the street. No, Gert. No one else should see
this.

But the phone’s all the way over by the door to the den, and she’s slapping his face so that he has to pull back. He doesn’t want his kids to hear this, so he whispers, “Hush, Joy! It’s me. It’s Dick.” When he sees her wince in pain from his weight, he knows that he’s gone too far. Now, with his guard down, she’s squirming free, twisting her hips to break away. He has to tighten his g
rip.

“Devil! I can’t brea
the.”

And that’s when Gert comes through the screen door. “D
ick?”

“Ge
rt!”

Gert couldn’t sleep, so she was driving to the A&P to pick up a few things. On the way she saw the light on in Joy’s kitchen, so she turned around because she’s been worried about Joy. Gert can’t believe what she’s seeing. She’s known Dick since they were teenagers. She liked him so much she introduced him to her baby sister. “Dick! What are you doing?” He looks up at Gert like he’s never before seen this woman beneath him. “What do you know about this, Gert?” His eyes are brimming with t
ears.