Seven weeks later the doctors grant me a day pass. It’s my birthday, so I leave a message telling Mom to get a cab and come pick me up. I want a birthday dinner at Papa Joe’s. I’ll have my petite filet mignon and lava cake with a candle in it. People will sing me that little song.
I wait and wait but nobody comes. I say to a nurse, “Mom wouldn’t celebrate my birthday. I called and she never called back.” “You thought she could work a phone and drive a car? All of that’s too complicated for her now.” “No it isn’t! Everyone keeps saying she’s so frail, but I just saw her last month and she was fine. She was glad to see me.” “Just because she recognized you doesn’t mean she’s fine. Dementia only goes in one direction,” says the nurse. She’s got a mean streak. Other nurses say it’s because of compassion fatigue, but I think she’s just a bully. Marie, a patient who likes to sneak up on people, taps me on the shoulder. I hate it when she does that, but she is the only one with a car in our group, so I don’t over-react or anything. I try to stay on her good side. “I’ll take you to see your mother if you look at some apartments with me.” She’s a deal-maker, that Marie, always striking some bargain or other. She’s almost done with treatment and will be taking her car with her when she leaves, so I grab my chance to ride while I can. I figure Marie will get hungry well before I get sick of looking at rentals, so we can go get Mom and celebrate my birthday at Papa Joe’s then. We go to see a few places, and we make all the landladies nervous. Marie suggests we wear sunglasses when we greet them so we look less drugged-out. It backfires. It turns out our bruised eyes only put them more on edge if they can’t see through to the pupils. One mutters something about the devil you know being better than the devil you don’t. I whisper to Marie as I push my glasses on top of my head, “She doesn’t trust people who won’t show their eyes.” “Eyes are windows to the soul,” Marie answers vacantly, and for a minute I’m not sure who she’s talking to since she still has her shades on. One landlady isn’t put off by our cloistered eyes. She looks to be a hundred years old and maybe can’t see much anyways. She unlocks a dismal little unit for us, points out the obvious, bathroom and a sleeping alcove for those who don’t want to use the pull-out couch in the living room; then she offers us tea. “I like this apartment the best of all,” she says while she clangs around in the kitchenette. “I often sneak away and have a snack here or take some rest.” I look over at the narrow iron bed. The chenille bedspread is disturbed, and I can see the impression of her body’s small comma in it. She motions us toward the chairs around the dining table. “The sun hits my favorite chair just right in the afternoons. It calms me down. I’ve been so nervous since my husband died.” Her features contract and I wait for her to cry, wondering what it would take for to her stroke out. She doesn’t. Cry, I mean. Instead, she ducks back into the kitchenette and brings out a tea tray, landing it from a weird angle onto the table. What shaky hands she has. Thin, too. It would be awful if her wrists broke with the weight of the teapot. She’d cry then, I bet. “You girls aren’t a romantic couple, are you?” She peers at Marie while pouring a stream of tea into the cup, spilling some. Marie blushes stupidly. “You can’t ask that. It’s not allowed,” she says, drawing her brows together in a frown. “She’s the only one looking for a place,” I explain. “I already have a house.” “I only ask because I can never tell about these things. I didn’t realize my husband preferred men until our first anniversary had passed and I was still a virgin.” This is vaguely interesting, so we sit there and listen. With her memory unlatched, she tells us all she knows about men and love. It isn’t much, but it takes her a long time to spit it out. She talks until our tea turns cold. Marie decides to take the place. When we’re done with her paperwork, I tell her I’m surprised that she wanted this particular apartment, with this particular landlady. The old woman already gave us her whole life history, so her entertainment value is gone, in my book anyways. “Why pick her?” “She reminds me of my granny.” “Was yours as clueless as this one?” “I don’t remember.” “You know she will just let herself into your place any time she wants to take a nap or sit in her sunbeam. She’ll tell you she forgot the apartment was yours, or deny she ever rented it to you.” They forget and deny. Who said that? I know I’ve heard it before. Next stop: home sweet home. We go to pick up Mom. She recognizes me just fine, but knows Marie is a stranger. A very strange stranger. We drive with Mom to the bank, and on to Papa Joe’s for lunch. It’s our old routine, from the days when she would pop into my bedroom before I was even ready to get up, wanting to know “Where should we go today, dear?” At the table, Marie hunches over Mom the whole time, talking nonsense. Everybody hovers over Mom because she is so pretty, and dresses so well, even at her age. She never forgets to put on her red lipstick. She must not be as bad off as everyone says if she can remember the damn lipstick. Marie keeps up a steady stream of suggestions for Mom. “You should look after your daughter,” she repeats like a broken record or something. Mom shrinks away from her and keeps looking at me like she expects me to do something. What, I don’t know. I can’t think of anything, so I go on eating my petite filet mignon. Mom hardly touches her food, but I still want us to order a birthday dessert. The wait staff sticks a sparkler in the cake when I tell them it’s my birthday, but nobody sings to me. Once home, I get rid of Marie, even though it means I won’t have a ride back to the hospital. I’ll worry about that later. Maybe I won’t go back at all. I don’t have to. I’m supposed to move into the halfway house tonight anyways. I seat Mom at the kitchen table with some drawing paper and oil pastels, and push a straw into a bottle of Ensure for her. The remains of her lunch go into the fridge. She probably won’t want her leftovers for dinner. I’ll have to eat the ham sandwich with the little crescent-shaped bite mark, and then the birthday cake with some of the frosting licked off. She’s gonna make me gain weight. I leave her in the kitchen and walk down the hall to my room, to get some springtime clothes out of my closet. The winter things I’ve been wearing are too heavy now. I stuff some cotton pants and short-sleeved shirts in a big trash bag designed for dead leaves, choke it closed, and tie it tight. When I rise from my crouch, I look at the objects and ornaments on my dresser and desk, all where I left them. Why do I feel so disconnected from them all of a sudden? I haven’t been away that long. It feels as if I left them in the past where everything fades and takes on a musty smell. I pull them back into the present, handling the objects carefully. That’s because of my tremor. The ceramic elephant pasted with tiny mirrors and the miniature Carnival mask─ I wouldn’t want to break either one or disturb them even a tiny bit. Because I know that although they are motionless now, they might come awake at any moment. They’ve done it before. The green curtains on the sliding glass door seem to move when I stare at them. The phantoms that erupted in their folds last fall are long gone now, so I know it’s just my mind playing tricks on me. I pull the curtains aside to look out over the balcony. There is a stack of firewood still in the neighbor’s backyard. I count the logs lolling in the sunshine. I can’t always count them, especially at night, because they are too black against the dark to see. How many times have I had to run outside to check them? I’d stand over the pile and count, but then lose track and have to start over. Mom was always coming out of the house to pull me away before the neighbors called the police. I don’t know why anyone would do that. I was always careful to stay on my own property, and it wasn’t like I was screaming out the numbers or anything. I bet nobody even noticed. Mom was probably the only one. The creaking of the heavy front door, opening and closing, startles me. My heartbeat quivers in my neck. Who’s there? That can’t be my sister’s voice floating in the air, can it? It sounds exactly like her. Am I hallucinating? I better not be, or somebody’s getting sued for malpractice! I step into the hall and glimpse the curve of Clara’s back as she slides into the kitchen. She senses me, turns around, and practically skips to me. We awkwardly hug, with the present she brought wedged between us. “Did you come just for my birthday?” I say, taking the box from her. What I really want to know is how long she plans to stay. If it’s long enough, maybe she can chase Eddie away. She’ll help me with Mom so he won’t have to, and then he won’t have an excuse to hang around anymore. He’s always ready to let someone else pick up the slack, anyways. “What better day to begin my visit?” I didn’t even realize she was planning a trip. Why didn’t she tell me? She should have told me. We try to make small talk as I open her gift, a soft teal sweater. “It’s just what I wanted!” I say, and pat her hand in thanks. I don’t really need another sweater, but she likes to pay for things. She smiles, and for no reason, her eyes film over with tears. She quickly wipes them away and I can read her face again. We take our old seats at the round glass-topped table. Mom is still there, drawing her picture. Clara greets her gently, instead of smothering her in a hug she might mistake for an assault. I’m sure she came prepared for our mother not to recognize her, but she looks disappointed all the same. Clara won’t push Mom for a response, though. She’s good at waiting things out. She’s got a lot more patience than I do. Mom reaches out to tug at the new sweater but I pull it away from her. Clara says, “I think she wants to try it on.” “Oh. I guess she does.” I feel a pang for the old days when my sister would give me everything, and never take anything away. It didn’t matter who else wanted whatever it was, even if she wanted it hrself. I drape the cashmere over our mother’s thin shoulders and she shivers with pleasure. “She’s cold all the time now.” “When did that start?” “I can’t remember. I’ve lost track of some kinds of time. You know, like a blackout drunk does. My counselors call drinking a kind of self-medicating behavior.” Clara winces and I register her discomfort. “I don’t do any of that anymore, in case you’re worried.” The muscles in her face immediately unclench, and I giggle at how easy it is to get a rise out of her. She doesn’t get the giggle and looks at me quizzically. I know she remembers all those years when I’d lock myself in my studio, turn the music up loud, and paint with a brush in one hand and a beer can in the other. Lots of times, I’d work myself into a drunken rage, and destroy the work I just finished, or couldn’t finish. I’d scribble over my marks with black or red paint. I ruined plenty of canvases that way. You could call those paintings my Drunk Series. Seriously. Clara asks me what the deal is with day passes. She's trying to change the subject from drinking. “I thought I’d have to go to the hospital to see you.” “You probably wouldn’t have found me there. I’m moving into a halfway house tonight. What did you just ask me, again? Oh, about the passes. The day passes are not a privilege you have to earn. It’s more like a courtesy, so that staff doesn’t worry if you’re not where you’re supposed to be. But there’s nothing holding me at the hospital at this stage of my recovery. Yesterday one guy just walked away from our group. We were all on the little bricked-in patio to get some air, and he just left. Nobody went after him. It’s allowed—you can just leave whenever you want as long as you come back for your monthly shot of anti-psychotic.” ”What I’d like to know is what will happen to the patient who walked away.” “He’ll probably just go home and pick up wherever he left off.” “Hmm. Or a more likely scenario—he leaves without learning the skills to protect himself against another episode, and breaks down again. See many familiar faces coming and going?” So she’s going to get all shrink-y on me, is she? She used to trust my decisions. “Oh, I don’t know. Not every face interests me. I remember this one guy who always called me Pretty Lady in group. He came back so crazy looking that I almost didn’t recognize him.” Clara looks at me like she’s waiting for me to add two plus two. I throw this out instead: “People think you’re less crazy when you’re pretty, ever notice that?” I watch lines of worry scrawl across her face. She nods, but changes the subject again, this time to Marie. She wants to know all her details—who, what, when, where, why. “Marie’s boring. All she ever wants to do is talk about her mother,” I say. “What about her mother?” “Marie says she was trying to kick her out of the house, and tricked the cops into arresting her. Kinda like Eddie did.” “Hmm. What’s Marie’s diagnosis?” “She’s paranoid schizophrenic. She’s officially stable now and after a little more time at the halfway house she’ll move into a subsidized apartment. We went to see a few of those today, to get her on a waiting list. The places are all interchangeable little boxes, and the landlady who showed us the one Marie picked was probably weirder than Marie. Maybe that’s why she liked her. Anyways, Marie has a car and I wanted her to take me to see Mom after we were done with the housing stuff. I wanted her to drive us to the bank and to Papa Joe’s. Mom didn’t seem to like Marie, though. Maybe Marie is too crazy for her. She kept leaning into Mom saying weird things while we tried to eat lunch.” “The people scared me,” Mom pipes up. “I really must discuss it with the men.” I have a show coming up and plenty of work to do, so I go to the house a few afternoons a week. I’m not there to visit the family. I’m there to work. Today I can hear music seeping under the door even before I unlock it. Inside, Clara and Mom are sitting on the yellow leather couch in the family room, listening. In a space with an electric organ, piano, drums, a violin, guitar, and clarinet, the notes rising up are from a cheap CD player. For years, I was the one listening to music with Mom. Clara has taken that over already. Well, she’s a trained musician so maybe she tells Mom interesting things about the pieces that I couldn’t, though the phrase trained musician makes me think of circus animals. I wave to the girls and run upstairs to my studio before they can make me talk. A few minutes later Eddie comes in. I hear the rumble of his voice, interrupting everybody. He doesn’t know how to listen to music. Too bad. It would be good for his blood pressure, but it’s just background noise to him. Even when we were kids, he ignored the music coming from different rooms in the house. Deaf to it all, he would keep on doing his homework in front of the television. It’s probably how he developed his concentration. I wish I had more of that these days. Mine used to be as good as his. So was my memory. His presence makes me feel all prickly. I don’t trust him, but he probably doesn’t trust me, either. I shouldn’t have cut up his clothes. He probably won’t ever forgive me for that. I wrote him an apology, but he never responded. How rude. I don’t have to talk to him today. It’s like I’m invisible when I’m in my studio. They can’t see me but I can hear them from a certain corner of the room. People call a spot like that a whispering gallery, I think. No matter how quietly my family talks, the sound floats up through the vents into my room. That spot is the whole reason I always know what goes on in this house before anyone else does. I know everyone’s secrets. None of them know mine. “Have you spoken to Mandy about her plans?” Clara is asking Eddie, all serious and focused. She’s keeping her voice soft but it reaches me, not loud, but clear. “No. I get updates from the caseworker, Greg. And you usually know her status before I do.” “Do you know that she just graduated from the hospital to a halfway house?” “No! Isn’t it too soon?” “I sure think so. What happened to the projected two years of treatment?” “Maybe they meant two years including the halfway house.” “That must be it. Have you noticed that they’ve stopped saying she’ll get back most of the function she lost during the beginning of the big relapse? Now they say she’ll never be the same.” “Greg says she still has no insight into her own situation.” They stop speaking for a minute. Then Clara says, “How many checks did the cops do, with no follow-through? They could have got her into treatment faster and saved some brain function.” “At least now she’s securely in the system and can’t refuse her meds. But I can’t help thinking it’s basically a lost cause.” My head is hot. My brain is burning. My own family thinks I’m lost. I move away from the corner and my siblings’ droning voices. I stand in front of my easel to watch the nostalgic sepia tones of my underpainting move. The color of an old photograph trying to remind me of worn-out loyalties shows me the image of two figures crawling up from the depths of the canvas. On the right, I layer in the figure of my brother, in pain. Lots of black background, the figure dressed in black, face drained of color. I paint my own image on the left, slightly suspended above him with a light of white, yellow, and pink surrounding my face, also whitened to reflect his pallor. The colors reach out to him. They make me think of the sympathy I once felt for him, but my witchy black clothes and a background of angry orange make it impossible for us to connect. I wait for the abstract elements to meld into the figurative, but they don’t. They won’t. It’s no use. I slash black paint diagonally across my brother’s image. I cross him out. Then I call a cab and leave without saying goodbye to anybody. The door to the halfway house where I have signed up to live cracks open, inviting me in, but this is not my home. It is old and crumbling, and it stinks of mold. The grey rooms can’t hide their ghosts, the suicides and patients who died from poison pills and electric shocks. Some of their spirits talk to me, others brush my hair the way they did when I was a child. They praised me back then whenever I drew their likenesses on paper. Now they are silent. The space here is opaque and dense. To someone with no real vision, it might seem organized, all of a piece, tightly woven. But to someone who can see, the threads are loose, the pattern in disarray. It is disorganized as the thinking that redefines everything—threats soughing through the wind, trees perpetually falling, one sibling’s double-cross. I climb the steps to my room. My roommate is there. She keeps staring at me, bony knees pulled up against her chest, rocking and rocking in the chair in the corner. She won’t talk. She only stares, never blinking, forever rocking. I stand behind her and tip her chair all the way backward and then all the way forward. She slides out of the seat like a pudding onto the floor. She doesn’t protest, so when she climbs back into the chair, I do it again. On the walls, the greys have begun to shimmer. They are telling me that something good will happen very soon. They are on my side and they will help me move back home. “There’s nobody to let me in, again.” I’m calling Clara from the steps of the group house on an ordinary Tuesday, dusk falling all around me. “The inmates aren’t back from the festival they went to. It was way too loud and gave me anxiety, so I walked back. Can you give me another hundred dollars? I only have thirty-six in my account. Steven told me to keep getting as much money and stuff out of you as I can.” “Oh he did, did he. You don’t have to trick me into doing what I’ve always done for you, you know. I wasn’t planning on ignoring your needs just because the government is supposed to take care of you. So. Is your caseworker getting your bills paid on time?” “She’s doing everything ok I guess, but I’m going to petition to get control of my own income. I’m stable now. Riding the bus anyplace is killing my leg, so I need to take more cabs for a while. That’s why I need money. But if you don’t want to give me money for cabs, I still need some for more clothes. The counselors here are making me get four pairs of pants and seven shirts, and seven pairs of underwear and three pairs of socks for the summer. They want me to go to Goodwill with them to get everything.” I have clothes at home, my real home. The one Clara is living in with my mother. In my brain, my father nods his see-through head in agreement. He’s my oracle, the doctors say. I ask him questions and he nods yes or no. Sometimes he reaches out his hand to me the same way he did on the shower floor while he had his first heart attack. I was only a kid. Anyone that young would have run away. People shouldn’t expect so much from children. Clara is saying something I don’t feel like listening to, so I cut in. “Maybe if I buy something it will shut the counselors up. But they keep making other demands on me, too. I have to do chores even during an anxiety attack, but I need to close the door and curtains when the attacks come. I lie on my bed and watch the red numbers on my clock pass the time. You know all this, and now the team does too, but they don’t care. They order me to scrub floors in the middle of my attacks, if it’s my turn for housekeeping. They are the guards and we are the prisoners.” “Can’t you get your doctor to excuse you?” “My doctor wrote a note saying that I can’t do physical work when I’m having an attack. The counselors ignored it, and they keep on ignoring it. I’m too exhausted to fight back so I give in. And then last night one of the crazies kept jumping on my bed. I told her to quit it, but she jumped on top of me. She’s way fatter than I am and she made weird sounds. I pushed her away and made a run for it. This is the third time I’ve had to go get the nurse. She had to hold the girl down with the help of two orderlies to give her a shot.” “What are you telling me? You’re not safe there?” “I don’t feel safe.” “They have to be able to guarantee your physical safety, at least! You have rights. Do you want me to find out about filing an official complaint?” “Sure, if you want to. The physical danger is just one side of it, though. Like today, one power-hungry counselor tried to humiliate me at lunch. I happened to scratch my nose but continued to eat. ‘Go wash your hands!’ she yelled. ‘I washed them already.’ ‘You just scratched your nose. I saw you. So get up, go into the bathroom, and wash your hands again.’ I felt all the eyes in the room burning holes in my back as I left.” Next time, I won’t come back. I don’t have to live there. I already have a home, even though someone else is living there instead of me; and right now she is crying.
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AuthorCheryl Snell is an award-winning poet and novelist, author of the new family saga Bombay Trilogy, a retelling of her previous novels Shiva's Arms, Rescuing Ranu, and Kalpavriksha. Archives
October 2020
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