The World Below (6 page)

I
came to stay at my grandmother’s for the first time when I was seven. Lawrence was nine. It was my mother’s first breakdown in the eleven years since her marriage, but the family was so well prepared that it seemed they’d all been expecting it for a long, long time.

She’d gotten us up in the night. My father was away. He was often away when we were small. He was a lawyer. He dealt with business mergers, and he frequently had to travel at a certain stage in the negotiations to help work out issues of seniority and of salary schedules.

Mother made us get dressed. She herself was wearing an old wool coat, tweed, and galoshes over which her pajama legs belled out. She was very gay, very happy and excited, so we didn’t protest too much, though Lawrence has told me since he knew right away that something was wrong. It was as if at that moment, as he woke from his thick sleep to her urgency, he could see how everything was going to be with her from then on.

We went for a long walk in the pitch black of our suburban neighborhood. At first it all seemed very orderly, very well planned, in spite of the hour and the deep stillness of the dark streets. “See, children? Now here we turn left,” she’d say, pleased; and we’d turn
left. But it didn’t end, and it didn’t end, and Mother seemed increasingly desperate as we flagged. Certain things
had
to be done certain ways. We couldn’t stop! We couldn’t rest. Down here we had to go right. Wasn’t it right? Maybe it was left. She began to moan a little to herself as her uneasiness and uncertainty grew.

It was Lawrence who finally broke away, who rang someone’s bell—by now the sky was turning a pale pink—and told the frightened-looking woman who opened the door that we needed help, that something was wrong with our mother. The woman came out in her robe, came down the walk and tried to talk to Mother, but that was no good, we could all see that right away. Mother began to get shrill and angry. “I cannot—I cannot tolerate your stupid, stupid
interference
! You mind your own goddamn business, why don’t you? You … 
interference
. You … 
stupidity
!”

A little while later the police came, driving up slowly alongside our odd procession, smiling and affable. We all got in. Mother thought they’d come to help us get to where she needed to go, so she didn’t protest. And after that, everything unfolded as if according to some master plan. We went to family friends and spent the day, not even having to go to school, to our delight. That afternoon my father came back early from his trip and took us home, and the next day we all got on the train in downtown Chicago to go to my grandparents’. Our rooms at their house were ready for us, and we began going to the village school just a few days later.

What I remember of the strange night that triggered this change in our lives was the long walk between the widely separated streetlights on the grand, leafy Oak Park streets, each light the oasis that called us forward, that we had to pass through to plunge again into the blackness ahead of it. That, and my mother speaking to the kind woman who tried to help, using a tone of voice and words I’d never heard before. And the police, appearing so suddenly next to us—the gentleness, the friendliness of the big men in their uniforms and the way their car smelled inside: leathery, male, reassuring.

I can call up, too, the magical ride on the train, where we had our own sleeping car. Lawrence and I shared the berth above our father. We slept with our heads at its opposite ends, and in the morning we leg-wrestled for a while before we got up; and the porter called me “little missy” as we stepped off the train onto the platform, which Lawrence and I found hilarious.

I don’t think I ever asked about my mother once we were settled at my grandparents’—it seemed somehow we were not supposed to. I thought of this later, when I was a parent myself, of how impossible it was for me as a child to
bring something up
in what seemed like a cautionary void. “Wait until they ask,” “Wait until they want to know,” the books and advice columns say. But my theory is everyone always wants to know, even when they don’t have an inkling of what they want to know about. I explained everything to my children, long before their questions could have been framed. Mostly the divorce and their father’s absence from their lives but also the meaning of swear words, the reasons people were so often unkind to one another, pregnancy and childbirth, sex and all its intricacies. Karen used to say that she was the only person she’d ever met who’d learned what a blow job was from her own mother. Better me than some others, I thought. She wasn’t so sure.

We stayed with my grandparents that first time for the whole school year, swaddled in thick
not-knowing
, safe. My mother went home from the hospital in April, but it was thought that her transition back—to us, the unspoken goal—should be gradual. And it was thought we should finish out the year in one place. So we stayed on with our grandparents in their enchanted village. Mother came east to be with us the last few weeks of school, and then we all went back to the Midwest together—my grandmother too, to help Mother manage for a while. She didn’t linger long. Mother seemed calm. She seemed, as everyone kept saying, “herself” again. Herself, but somehow different too, I thought.

I’m not sure what her treatment was, but I suspect electric shock therapy or insulin therapy. And she was medicated even after she was back.

Still, she could be easily upset. “What are
you
looking at?” she said to me abruptly, angrily, one day.

“Nothing,” I answered. A lie. I’d been staring at her.

“Well, just keep your big fat cow eyes to yourself,” she said. But she went on with what she was doing—sewing—and the next words she spoke to me were unremarkable and normal, something about what she was making.

She had seemed
taken over
when she was ill, and after that first breakdown (it was her second, actually, she’d had one in college also, though Lawrence and I didn’t know this until much later), this came and went more frequently, so that she’d slip into sudden anger or wildly coarse or threatening language for a few seconds at unpredictable moments in our ongoing lives. It was like having a tic. Like Tourette’s. We learned, all of us, to ignore it, to turn away and go on as though it hadn’t happened: the rage, the hurtful, childish words, sometimes the hitting.

And it didn’t affect the love Lawrence and I had for her, except perhaps to intensify it. You read sometimes of abused children weeping in court to be returned to a parent who has beaten them or burned them with cigarettes. It seems almost incomprehensible that this should be so, but I understand it. Our attachment to our mother was deeper, wilder, more profound after she was ill. Those moments when she laughed, when she was relaxed and easy around us, are lit with a golden lantern in my memory. It was years before I let myself understand that what had seemed so special to me were what passes in most households as the most ordinary acts of parenthood: the table set, the beds made, the question asked about school, the smile when affection was offered, the willing touch of a hand to another’s hair or cheek, the food cooked and served.

I still don’t know what was wrong with her. No one ever gave it a name to Lawrence and me, and I suppose that the name—the diagnosis—changed
over the years anyway, as psychiatry and medicine altered the way people like my mother were looked at and thought of. At the time, though, we felt to blame. It seemed she had wanted something from us, from Lawrence and me, that we couldn’t give. Something you might call, simply,
more
. It was probably the least of her symptoms, I realize now, but it was the one that most touched us, this need of hers to be the focus of our attention; the
apple of our eye.

It is hard for a mother to achieve this; usually the reverse is true—the adoring parent, the unconscious child. But we tried, Lawrence and I. We strained to give her what she might feel was enough. And somehow angered her even with that, when she had the need to be angry.

My first morning in West Barstow was cold and damp. A mist hung low to the ground outside, as if being exhaled by the earth. Frost silvered the blades of the lushly overgrown grass. I made myself some more of the horrible coffee and sat in the chilly, bright living room with thick wool socks on, wondering what I’d do with the day. When I’d pictured myself living here, I’d always been outside in sunlight, walking, raking leaves; or driving down dappled country lanes, stopping to buy blackberries here, apple cider there. None of this seemed likely today, overcast as it was. I would have to improvise projects for myself.

In my other life—what I was thinking of as my
real
life now—I would be at work already, in the teacher’s lounge with Emily LaFollette, with Ellen Gerstein, with Carole McNamara and Bob Willburn. I would be having my last sips of coffee and listening to their talk before we all headed down to chapel and the start of the day. We’d be discussing whether Liddy Dole would suffer in the primaries because of her husband’s erectile dysfunction ads. Did this make her, somehow, politically laughable? Whether fat substitutes were carcinogenic. Whether Potrero Hill was safe at night. Whether Bob really needed to raise his kids Catholic now that he
had them, just because he’d promised to before he did. I missed it, I realized, even the most tedious aspects: Bob’s terrible dirty jokes, Emily’s ability to reproduce verbatim long and uninteresting conversations between her and her kids or her husband, Ellen’s ongoing bitter divorce.

The school was private, a girls’ school, one that clung to such traditions as the uniform, the formal standing greeting to the teacher at the start of class (though the girls knew how to bray it just enough too enthusiastically to show their contempt for the very notion of what they were doing), and chapel—of course no longer specifically religious. No, more a time for a quick homily of moral life from our headmistress, and sometimes just for announcements. I’d taught there for twenty years, in part because it meant my own girls could attend tuition-free at a time when I had no money, in part because I could work there without the teaching degree I would have had to get for public school—which paid better—and in part because I got used to the rhythms and routines and it was easy work. Time-consuming during the school year, but easy. I liked the girls too, most of them. And literature was a way of talking with them about life, of making them think about who they were, about what choices they might have.

If I moved to Vermont, there was no guarantee I’d find anything comparable. Probably not in a private school nearby, in any case. Was there, in fact, a private school nearby? I didn’t know. I had enough money not to have to worry for a while—Joe had been generous when we divorced—and if I sold my house in San Francisco I’d actually be quite comfortable. But I couldn’t imagine a life without work of some kind. To come here would be to start over, to invent myself anew. There had been moments, thinking about this in San Francisco, when I felt eager for it, even impatient. Now, sitting in my grandmother’s living room with not the least idea what to do with just this overcast day, I wasn’t so sure.

I had been slowly taking in the room around me as I thought about all this—sipping gingerly at the coffee and noticing again the
changed light in the house, even on a day as dark as this one, appreciating the well-chosen bursts of color, the spare quality—when suddenly I thought
Enough of this
. I took my cup back to the kitchen and poured the remaining coffee out into the old soapstone sink. I went back upstairs and got dressed, washed my face, and put makeup on. It was ten-thirty by now, still as dark as a much earlier hour outside, but it wasn’t really raining, not yet. I decided to go for a walk.

I’d learned to be a respecter of motion, even of
going through the motions
, after Joe moved out. I’d been motionless for some time then, and just the memory of that could terrify me—my blankness, my ability to sit unmoving for long hours, looking out a window, listening to street noises or the tic … tic … tic … tic of a clock dropping seconds. I remember being grateful that school was in session then, that I was forced to get up each day and perform in that context anyway—and I performed adequately, if not well; but I had enough goodwill built up from having done it well before so that even the girls went along with my charade. They continued to work, to behave for me, whereas with a newcomer with as little energy as I had there would have been minor rebellions. Note-passing. That barely masked rudeness and disobedience that signals the imminent arrival of classroom chaos.

I collapsed once I got through work each day. When I bothered to eat, I did it standing in the kitchen, never even turning on the expensive appliances, just making odd meals from whatever was left of my dwindling supply of groceries: peanut butter on stale crackers, or cereal, or canned soup. I stopped cleaning. When friends called and suggested doing things, I made up lies, reasons I couldn’t. The thought of it: getting in the car; driving to the theater or a restaurant or a museum; parking; then talking, looking, eating, smiling—all that seemed like insurmountably difficult
labor.

An accident in the car brought it to an end, this spell of blank misery I was in.

I was on 101, heading north for home from a meeting at a fellow teacher’s house. I was in the passing lane, almost pulling alongsid
a car going slower in the traveling lane, when I saw a jerk speeding toward me from behind and to the right—also in the traveling lane. I knew he was going to pass me on the right and cut in. I knew it. I could tell by his assaultive speed in the rearview mirror and then also by instinct. I slowed, to give him room for his maneuver.

And he did, he cut in sharply in front of me from the right, with barely enough room to make it in the space I’d left. But he’d cut too hard, he was going too fast; his car began to fishtail lazily—in memory, almost gracefully—left, right, left. In response, I began to brake, to swerve too. Everything was happening very fast and very slowly at the same time: I was aware of his long slide sideways in front of the car I’d been trying to pass, of that car’s swerving and braking too, of my own braking with all my strength, steering sharply to the left, away from whatever was going to happen with them; of hitting the guard rail, then hitting it again as I slowed and turned and came to a stop in the ripping of metal, the screaming of my own tires and brakes and others’; and what I’d been thinking as I responded, as I acted, was passionately and violently
angry
, more than anything else: Not
me
! Not
me
! Not
now
!