Perhaps that was the worst thing that I could have said. She didn’t possess the emotional capacity to assume responsibility for the lives of others.
She seized the rose that she had cut for me, gripped it by the bloom and tore it out of my hand.
Because I failed to release the rose quickly enough, the stem ripped between my fingers, and a thorn pierced the pad of my thumb, broke off in the flesh.
She crushed the bloom and threw it on the ground. She turned away from me and strode toward the house.
I would not relent. I caught up with her, moved at her side, pleading for a few minutes of conversation that might clarify my thoughts and help me understand why I had come here, of all places, at this mortal hour.
She hurried, and I hurried with her. By the time she reached the steps to the back porch, she had broken into a run, the skirt of her sundress rustling like wings, one hand on her bonnet to hold it on her head.
The screen door slammed behind her as she disappeared into the house. I stopped on the porch, reluctant to go farther.
Although I regretted the need to harass her, I felt harassed myself, and desperate.
Calling to her through the screen, I said, “I’m not going away. I can’t this time. I have nowhere to go.”
She didn’t answer me. Beyond the screen door, a curtained kitchen lay in shadows, too still to be harboring my tormented mother. She’d gone deeper into the house.
“I’ll be here on the porch,” I shouted. “I’ll be waiting right here. All day if I have to.”
Heart hammering, I sat on the porch floor, my feet on the top step, facing away from the kitchen door.
Later, I would realize that I must have come to her house with the subconscious intention of triggering precisely this response and driving her quickly to her ultimate defense against responsibility. The gun.
At that moment, however, confusion was my companion, and clarity seemed far beyond my reach.
FIFTY-THREE
THE SHANK OF THE THORN PROTRUDED FROM my thumb. I plucked it free, but still the bleeding puncture burned as if contaminated by an acid.
To a shameful degree, sitting there on my mother’s porch steps, I felt sorry for myself, as though it had been not a single thorn but a crown’s worth.
As a child, when I had a toothache, I could expect no maternal pampering. My mother always called my father or a neighbor to take me to the dentist, while she retreated to her bedroom and locked her door. She sought refuge there for a day or two, until she felt certain I would have no lingering complaint that she might need to address.
The slightest fever or sore throat that troubled me was a crisis with which she could not deal. At seven, afflicted by appendicitis, I collapsed at school and was rushed from there to the hospital; had my condition deteriorated at home, she might have left me to die in my room, while she occupied herself with the soothing books and the music and the other genteel interests with which she determinedly fashioned her private perfecto mundo, her “perfect world.”
My emotional needs, my fears and joys, my doubts and hopes, my miseries and anxieties were mine to explore or resolve without her counsel or sympathy. We spoke only of those things that did not disturb her or make her feel obliged to offer guidance.
For sixteen years we shared a house as though we lived not in the same world but in parallel dimensions that rarely intersected. The chief characteristics of my childhood were an aching loneliness and the daily struggle to avoid a bleakness of spirit that unrelieved loneliness can foment.
On those grim occasions when events had forced our parallel worlds to intersect in crises that my mother could not tolerate and from which she could not easily withdraw, she reliably resorted to the same instrument of control. The gun. The terror of those dark encounters and the subsequent guilt that racked me made loneliness preferable to any contact that distressed her.
Now, pressing thumb and forefinger tight together to stop the bleeding, I heard the twang of the spring on the screen door.
I couldn’t bear to turn and look at her. The old ritual would play out soon enough.
Behind me, she said, “Just go.”
Gazing into the complexity of shadows cast by the oaks, to the bright rose garden beyond, I said, “I can’t. Not this time.”
I checked my watch—11:32. My tension could not have wound any tighter, minute by minute, if this had been a bomb clock on my wrist.
Her voice had grown flat and strained under the weight of the burden that I’d placed upon her, the burden of simple human kindness and caring, which she could not carry. “I won’t put up with this.”
“I know. But there’s something…I’m not sure what…something you can do to help me.”
She sat beside me at the head of the porch steps. She held the pistol in both hands, aimed for the moment at the oak-shaded yard.
She engaged in no fakery. The pistol was loaded.
“I won’t live this way,” she said. “I won’t. I can’t. People always wanting things, sucking away my blood. All of you—wanting, wanting, greedy, insatiable. Your need…it’s like a suit of iron to me, the weight, like being buried alive.”
Not in years—perhaps never—had I pressed her as hard as I did on that fateful Wednesday: “The crazy thing is, Mother, after more than twenty years of this crap, down at the bottom of my heart, where it ought to be the darkest, I think there’s still this spark of love for you. It may be pity, I’m not sure, but it hurts enough to be love.”
She doesn’t want love from me or anyone. She doesn’t have it to give in return. She doesn’t believe in love. She is afraid to believe in it and the demands that come with it. She wants only undemanding congeniality, only relationships that require less than lip service to be sustained. Her perfect world has a population of one, and if she does not love herself, she has at least the tenderest affection for herself and craves her own company when she must be with others.
My uncertain declaration of love inspired her to turn the gun upon herself. She pressed the muzzle against her throat, angling it slightly toward her chin, the better to blow out her brains.
With hard words and cold indifference, she can turn away anyone she chooses, but sometimes those weapons have not been sufficiently effective in our turbulent relationship. Even though she doesn’t feel it, she recognizes the existence of a special bond between mother and child, and she knows that sometimes it won’t be broken by any but the cruelest measures.
“You want to pull the trigger for me?” she asked.
As I always do, I looked away. As if I had inhaled the shade of the oaks along with the air, as if my lungs passed it into my blood, I felt a cold shadow arise in the chambers of my heart.
As she always does when I avert my eyes, she said, “Look at me, look at me, or I’ll gut-shoot myself and die slow and screaming right here in front of you.”
Sickened, trembling, I gave her the attention that she wanted.
“You might as well pull the trigger yourself, you little shit. It’s no different than making me pull it.”
I couldn’t count—and didn’t care to remember—how often I had heard this challenge before.
My mother is insane. Psychologists might use an array of more specific and less judgmental terms, but in the Dictionary of Odd, her behavior is the definition of insanity.
I have been told that she wasn’t always like this. As a child, she had been sweet, playful, affectionate.
Th
e terrible change occurred when she was sixteen. She began to experience sudden mood swings. The sweetness was supplanted by an unrelenting, simmering anger that she could best control when she was alone.
Therapy and a series of medications failed to restore her former good nature. When, at eighteen, she rejected further treatment, no one insisted that she continue with psychotherapy or drugs, because at that time she hadn’t been as dysfunctional, as solipsistic, and as threatening as she became by her early twenties.
When my father met her, she was just moody enough and dangerous enough to infatuate him. As she grew worse, he bailed.
She has never been institutionalized because her self-control is excellent when she’s not being challenged to interact with others beyond her capacity. She limits all threats of violence to suicide and occasionally to me, presenting a charming or at least rational face to the world.
Because she has a comfortable income without the need to work and because she prefers life as a recluse, her true condition is not widely recognized in Pico Mundo.
Her exceptional beauty also helps her to keep her secrets. Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.
Her voice grew raw and more confrontational: “I curse the night I let your idiot father squirt you into me.”
This didn’t shock me. I’d heard it before, and worse.
She said, “I should’ve had you scraped out of me and thrown in the garbage. But what would I have gotten from the divorce then? You were the ticket.”
When I look at my mother in this condition, I don’t see hatred in her, but anguish and desperation and even terror. I can’t imagine the pain and the horror of being her.
I take solace only in the knowledge that when she is alone, when she is not challenged to give anything of herself, she is content if not happy. I want her to be at least content.
She said, “Either stop sucking my blood or pull the trigger, you little shit.”
One of my most vivid early memories is of a rainy night in January when I was five years old and suffering with influenza. When not coughing, I cried for attention and relief, and my mother was unable to find a corner of the house in which she could entirely escape the sound of my misery.