Background

I always knew I was adopted. We were told before we knew about sex; I don’t know what the idea ‘real parents’ meant to us. I know it was one of the things that made me special, in my mind. I was left-handed, I was from the one Jewish family, and I was a changeling. To find out who I was was against the law.

I was adopted at thirteen days, and Sheldon and Louise were the stock nice Jewish couple, middle class, with a house in Massachusetts with a backyard and an upstairs. They were liberal politically; conservative in their domestic arrangements, avoidance of profanity, choice of friends. Just what anyone wants for parents, they were sweet people, people who made bad jokes and laughed like mad, who smoked and liked the beach, still in love from everything that I know.

My dad was an engineer for the government, developing radar systems, good safe money. He was from the West Side of Chicago. In a one-page stab at a memoir he once wrote, he described the gangsters on his street out shovelling snow. They waved to everyone, they seemed like perfectly nice people. That was what my father was like: everybody was nice, he saw the good side. Because his dad fixed cars, they weathered the Depression comfortably, and even owned a vacation cottage on Lake Michigan.

My mother was from the Bronx, and photos of her as a teen are like publicity shots for West Side Story; a pretty rangy girl in skin-tight pants, smoking, looking tough perched on the hood of a car with fins. Louise Oshins, a slanty-eyed knockout with a goofy grin and an hourglass figure – but Sheldon was the fat kid. Why did the knockout marry the fat boy? I asked my mother once and she said he was nice. ‘No – why?’ ‘He was nice.’ ‘But, Mom.’

Sheldon was the common-sense guy, easy-going, not that ambitious, liked his food and didn’t drink because he hated the effect it had on people. When a pretty girl walked by, he said, ‘Hoo ha!’ to the end of his days, he was unteachable on this point. Liked science fiction with corny jokes and smut, ideally Heinlein. He was not ashamed of being fat (three hundred-plus pounds); even when a chair broke under him during a meeting, Sheldon told it later as a funny story. He had to ask for a seatbelt extension when he took a plane. That didn’t embarrass him. As he got older, Sheldon struggled walking, his legs inadequate to his size. It was like an enormous wardrobe being rolled on tiny castors. Never had any crazy dreams about what his life might be. Work was for money. Love meant marriage. When he came home from work, my father watched TV, every night of his life, and didn’t want for more.

He was working class enough that he didn’t know, growing up, that he was bright. He discovered that when he was drafted for the Korean War. He got the short straw: the Marines. In that war, the life expectancy of a Marine platoon leader in battle was sixteen minutes, making this turn of events commensurate with a diagnosis of terminal illness. Sheldon scored in the highest category on the Marines selection test, allowing him a choice of training. He chose electrical engineering school for being longest, eighteen months. Boot camp took time as well, so by the time my dad was ready to fight, his tour of duty was effectively finished. He spent his last few military weeks on Martinique, flying light aircraft and walking on the beach.

Sheldon had no attachment, then or ever, to bravery, macho, glory. Though he worked for the Defense Department all his life, my dad found violence dumb. War topped the charts of dumb. And he was liberal in the blithe way of a man who assumes right-wingers are kooks. It was terrifying, Sheldon said, to meet the four-star generals. ‘Suddenly you realised, this fellow’s a – excuse my French – fucking idiot.’ Serving an enterprise he found stupid and malign didn’t worry him: working was for money.

He met Louise the year of his discharge from the Marines. She was nineteen; he was twenty-four and slim for him from two years in the service. A baby-faced man with a belly, his life was coasting into happiness; in the wedding photos you see his grateful cheer that things work out just right. They couldn’t have kids, so they adopted. That was for Louise; all women wanted kids, kids were happiness. Louise was twenty-eight when they got my brother Seth. I came two years later.

Then everything was fine for a long time. It was the American dream, it was suburbia. The world smelled like cut grass.

And how people often put it, if a person attempts suicide on multiple occasions, is: He killed himself five times. She killed herself four times before she made it. It’s an error that persists so stubbornly it’s not an error but a perception. The insight must be that (my mother, of course this is all my mother) didn’t live through those attempts, she came back from the dead. She came home from the hospital with death on her, unwholesome flesh, and she was never the same. She didn’t smell the same.

It began when I was nine. And over the next four years, my mother killed herself six times, before she finally made it. She was in and out of mental hospitals. The last time, I was thirteen and Sheldon was divorcing her finally; to spare the kids.

I still remember her measurements, which she repeated like a mantra, so vain: 36–26–36. She had a mania for tanning. Louise brewed her own tanning oil because the brand name stuff wasn’t strong enough. She was narcissistic, carping. Her conversation centred on her migraine headaches, minute shifts in mood, praise she had received. But I don’t exactly remember her. I remember fear of her, not her. She was a bully, maybe. She was a ‘bad mother’. She was doomed, it turns out, so I can’t hold it against her. I remember that I loved her devotedly, to excess, but I don’t remember what it was like.

 

My personality

As a child, I spent my free time in the woods, alone or with a comrade; balancing on logs, climbing trees, building forts that never stood. The New England forest was laced with creeks that froze in winter. You could walk along the milky ice, there were shapes like gnarled black lizards underneath. I had the firm belief I could discover a path into another reality (Narnia, Oz) so I kept looking. I was the ringleader, always daring the others to do the next, worse thing. It was I who insisted we take off our clothes in the woods, we crawl through the electric fence to get close to the horses, we run away from home.

When I was ten, my friend Sandra Jill Cameron told me she had made a remarkable discovery. There were microscopic animals that lived on sticks: giraffes, wolves, elephants. She, only she, had the ability to see them and communicate with them in English. By fiercely concentrating, I developed this ability too. We spent some weeks talking to the animals on the sticks, who told us many secrets about the past and future. Sandra Jill Cameron also discovered microscopic kings who lived in drawers. I remember going home alone one day and opening my drawer. I focused the force of my mind until I knew what the king was saying. I saw him in my mind in his yellow serrated crown, his poodle beard. He was foreshortened like a chess piece, which made his gait awkward; he made a rowing motion in his strenuous progress over my notebooks.

Then Sandra Jill admitted she’d been making it up. I cried and we had a wailing child-fight; I loved Sandra Jill Cameron then with the purity of fantasy, with the daft, exquisite love of poems and dogs. She had betrayed my love and put the drab lid of reality back on the world. I would never get over it.

A week later I announced to two other friends that I, only I, could see and hear the voices of microscopic animals that lived on sticks. In the course of a recess period, they too developed the uncanny ability.

One day I discovered I could communicate telepathically with my midnight-blue ceramic marble. It said it was lonely, lonely; I went across the street to inform my friend Becky Briggs. I was ready to hatch a plan to release the marble’s soul. She listened gravely, respectfully, before asking whether I was absolutely sure. I blushed, only then realising I was making it up.

I was always checking out books on extrasensory perception from the library, practising astral travel. You had to visualise a vortex and then allow yourself to be sucked in. Then you opened your eyes and the room stared back, absolutely unchanged.

At Becky Briggs’s house once, playing (miserably, tediously, how can anybody be into this) Barbies, I drifted off, staring at the spines of her stacked board games: Trouble, Battleship, Monopoly! One, whose rules were too complex for it to be any good, was called The Game of the States; an educational game about the US map. I suddenly announced my real parents were named States: Mr and Mrs States. It was clairvoyance, I was so nearly certain.

And sometimes I said my real parents were Cherokee Indians, competing with Becky who was really one-sixteenth Indian. That was why we could both walk on top of the snow’s crust without breaking through.

 

Louise

She’s in bed with a migraine headache. The ice bag on her head is disturbingly brain-shaped. Dark blue with white stars. It has a screw-off cap where you put in the ice cubes.

I have to be there to keep Mom company. She kills herself because of the pain, it’s migraines every day now. (‘It’s like I got a vice on my head.’) She’s had her thyroid cancer, too. It wasn’t terminal; a cancer that grew so slow, the doctors said, it could have gone twenty years without threatening her life. Still, safe side, she had an operation. Then the radiation treatments made her all-day nauseous; and she got her tubes tied, despite her infertility. If she got pregnant after the radiation, the baby would be a mutant. When Mom comes home from her treatments, we aren’t to touch her; she’s radioactive. It would give us cancer, too. And cancer, radiation, mutants, are all ideas from a horror movie, things which can’t be real.

I’m doing exercises on the floor, following instructions in her Ladies’ Home Journal for the ideal sit-up. I clown, standing on my head, falling splayed to make her laugh. I chatter, ‘Why are you depressed, Mom?’ ‘Because the migraines; it’s like I’ve got a vice on my head.’ And I ask her what it was like when she was my age, growing up in the Bronx.

So she tells me about the orange cat she had, Redrick von Ketchup. He climbed a telephone pole and got electrocuted, that was how he died. Louise was a smart kid, straight As; and her best friend was a girl named Shelley. Shelley like Sheldon, and I imagined my father telescoped into the frame of a child in a blue cotton dress. She had blonde curly hair of which my mother was jealous.

When I remember my mother at all, I remember fear and pity as the half-dark of pulled shades in a suburban bedroom. Kojak on a portable black-and-white TV; the flicker of black-and-white light on a quilted bedspread, on a TV tray. Going downstairs to fill her ice bag was a rite, like the exact execution of an OCD compulsion. Mom is going to kill herself but I am holding that time away as I go down the carpeted steps. I’m the one who understands. I can walk on the crust of the snow without breaking through, I can hear the thoughts of inanimate objects, I’m going to save her life.

 

My personality

My tenth birthday present was a manual typewriter. It had been my father’s college graduation present in ’58; for a couple of years, I’d been the only one to use it. A Smith Corona Clipper, it was ‘portable’ because it had a carrying case, though it weighed twenty pounds. I started writing books about animals escaping from zoos, or mustangs that had been rounded up but escaped through craft, or even stuffed animals that came to life and escaped from homes like mine.

My earliest extant work is a book called Love’s Magic Lands; a novel handwritten on white lined paper with illustrations in crayon. It tells the adventures of a stuffed lion cub called Love. Love runs away from his owner and journeys through various fantastic countries – Babyland, Candyland, Plasticland. A green plastic lion cub called Lemon-Lime is his travelling companion. Love’s Magic Lands was in its way a roman-à-clef: the heroes were real toys, belonging to friends of mine, that I passionately coveted. There were no human beings in Love’s Magic Lands, or in any story I wrote as a child.

Animals were better than people. When I died, I would be a wolf, a horse, in my next life. People were gross; obscenely bald with skin like vinyl. I thought of them as having the squeaky smell of the vinyl seats in a new car. The sea was dying with poison made by people. And the trees were dying, the end of the world. I was going to run away from home and live in the woods, I was learning how from books.

I discovered an anti-vivisection ad in one of the magazines I got from the library (Horse & Rider, Arabian Horse World, National Geographic). It described puppies undergoing surgery without anaesthetic, cats with bleach poured into their eyes. I reacted as if I had been told that the Nazi concentration camps had never been closed, they were still operating full-tilt and no one had mentioned this fact because it was normal to adults. I wrote an informational flyer on the manual typewriter and began to go round school asking the children to donate money to the fight against vivisection. I no longer remember why they didn’t give; only my strange feeling of being mute, invisible, because I couldn’t make anyone see.

There was another petition I wrote, against the real-estate development at the end of the street. They were going to cut down a patch of forest there, where we had our bike trails. I went from door to door throughout the neighbourhood, gathering signatures, but never did anything with it. I wouldn’t have known where it should go.

And sometimes I remember myself as if I lived alone in our three-storey house; like a child in a whimsical children’s book who inherits a three-storey house from an eccentric aunt. I lived on frozen pizza, ice cream, stayed up all night long. I don’t remember my family being there.

 

Louise

We’re at the mental hospital for the first time. We walk my mother, who is dead for the first time, lumbering and vacant, to the cafeteria. They’re serving duck à l’orange: for the rest of my life, that dish is, in my mind, radioactive. (The sauce looks radioactive. It’s what dead people eat. This is the world after nuclear war, the people walk like zombies.) As we sit, eating with harmless plastic cutlery, my mother says that she doesn’t feel anything any more. She doesn’t know if she loves us now. She doesn’t feel love.

We’re quiet, and I’m trying to feel the shape of this, like trying to sound out an unfamiliar word. It’s the thing Moms don’t say. It’s the thing they said was possible just to scare you. Then my father says, ‘Louise, you don’t mean that,’ helpless, angry. Seth and I are sent to the common room so he can speak to her alone.

In a mental hospital common room (later, one of dozens of trips, until it was like a family campground, it was where we went at the weekend) a patient taught me to play pool. I sank the orange solid first try, beginner’s luck. The patient was over-eager, thrilled for me, calling me the champ, like a shy uncle. I remember puzzles I put together, idle hours spent cross-legged on the carpeted floor of those common rooms; a new form of waiting for grown-ups.

And American culture is suddenly all about mental illness: the seventies. There are TV movies and best-selling books with titles like Diary of a Mad Housewife, The Cracker Factory. Divorce is the other topic. I’m beginning to read my father’s porn novels on the sly, and all these things are part of a growing warp in the nature of things. All afternoon there are no adults at home, you have that freedom you always wanted but it’s as if every sound you make is amplified, putting down a fork is deafening, you’re so scared.

I was trying to love her more. I was always telling her I loved her, trying to feel the shape of what I said. It was easy to love the cat. I loved my brother Seth so much I hated him. Not her, I couldn’t love her enough to make a difference, and trying left me with the feeling I had when I practised telekinesis and the paper clip would not move, though I knew the paper clip must move, and I entirely expected the paper clip to move, it didn’t. And there was a nothing happening that was unnaturally intense, as if this was the first time nothing had happened since the world began.

 

Therefore

My mother asks me to get her a soda. I’m brattish, resistant, ‘Mom. Why can’t you get it yourself?’ Still, I’m downstairs pouring it when I hear the crash. I run out, and Mom’s at the bottom of the stairs, curled against the sideboard there, blood in rivulets down her face. The blood is shockingly liquid, live. You can see it move.

I remember calling 911 and knowing as I dialled the phone I’d done it before. I don’t remember the other times.

‘I asked Sandy to get me a soda, because I felt too sick to go, and she said no. When I went to get it myself, I fainted at the top of the stairs,’ is what my mother says when my father arrives; her voice is weak, vague. She’s lying on the gold plush couch where I will lie, released from suspense, when I get the news of her death. The lights are low, the paramedics are packing their equipment, embarrassed, not looking at us. I don’t say anything. To object would be to break the run of luck that means she’s alive. She only has a mild concussion.

But when the paramedics have gone, my father says, reserved with anger, ‘Is that what really happened, Louise? Didn’t you really do it on purpose, because you were mad at Sandy?’

And Louise begins to wail and admit that she threw herself downstairs. Because she killed herself because she really wanted to die – and to punish us. She killed herself to get out of going to a family reunion. She did it because she couldn’t be our mother, we should leave her alone. She killed herself at us. And she would scream at us for failing her, not caring enough. One night she feigned psychosis, asking me if I had seen my (non-existent) soldier friend, saying she heard bombs; just play-acting, she later confessed, to impress us with how sick she was. The night before the final time, the time she didn’t come back from the dead, she’d taken Seth out bowling, and he’d said, ‘I’m worried about how Dad’s going to pay for our college if he has to pay alimony.’

And Dad said that was why she did it. She killed herself to make Seth feel guilty, Dad said; we were better off without her. By then I was an adult he could tell things, she was long dead, and he hated her. He never forgave Louise. He’d had a narrow path through life one person could ruin, and Louise had had no mercy.

I said to him, because I always defended my mother, ‘But you have to understand, she was always in so much pain. It was every day like that.’ My father said, implacable, ‘Why? Why? There was nothing wrong.’

And I have a memory from being very small, kindergarten; the year we lived in Florida. In the memory, there’s a tornado on the way, and I have to hurry inside to safety. I get to the screened-in porch of our house just in time. The storm is lashing, dry, against the screen. But it’s a storm of spiders. Hundreds of spiders are landing on the screen, crawling over the screened wall and ceiling. The porch is blacking out with spiders. I take my doll and put it in my toy oven to keep it safe from the storm, and then I go inside.

 

My personality

Then she kills herself. I lie on a sofa and experience despair as peace. Everything’s cold, but exquisitely quiet. I don’t call anyone, I don’t tell anyone. The next day the rabbi comes to the house to ask questions, gathering material for the funeral service. We struggle: she collected seashells, she loved Florida, she gardened, she liked cats. It’s a series of mild surprises; Louise had a personality, she was a woman who collected seashells, she wasn’t a disease at all. For the same reason, these factual statements feel like lies. When these items recur in the funeral service, they come across as an argument in favour of Louise still being alive.

She’s cremated offstage, we never see any body, coffin, evidence. At the funeral, they bury a small shiny box. If it was a gift, perfume. Folding chairs on the grass, bright autumn weather. A dragonfly pauses on my knee, as if singling me out.

My father guides me to the rental car and says he’ll be right back. I get in the back seat and, shutting the door, it’s over. I’m in the gentle spell of air conditioning. Nothing bad has ever happened to me in this car. On the drive home nothing can happen. It’s the enchanted peace of liminal space; how airports, taxis, and the few blocks’ walk between the bus stop and your destination can become a sanctuary. Then there’s a knock on the window.

It’s Louise’s father, Grandpa Alan. Through the tinted glass, he looks strange in his black suit; like a man who works in an office. I’ve rolled the window halfway down before I see he’s uncontrollably weeping. He thrusts his hand through the window and seizes my shoulder.

He says, choking and rushing the words, as if any moment he might be swept out of reach, ‘Remember Grandma – always remember she loves you.’

Then he’s gone. I’m crying as if I’m crying Grandpa’s tears. When at last I roll the window up, the car’s spell of safety is broken. It’s now the car in which that happened, in which I don’t know what sickening thing just happened. I don’t know why I’m crying yet.

I never see him again. My grandmother has ruled that Sheldon is to blame for Louise’s suicide. She will never speak to Sheldon, or to my brother and me, again. Her husband and my mother’s sister go along with the excommunication as a matter of course.