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Telling you about my mother is like first cleaning then assembling her gun. In the end, she’s whole. She’s dangerous again. My mother’s gun was always loaded and well-hidden. I can’t remember how many times I’ve ransacked her room, looking for it so I could stop her from holding it to her head again, stop her from putting it in her open mouth.
It’s impossible to tell this without making her into some soap-opera lunatic. It’s impossible for anything, even music, to contain her—even the click and lock of each part as it fits to another cannot make the device work properly. It’s impossible for me to tell this without making myself into something powerless, a listener waiting on the other side of the door, ear pressed to the wood, trying to divine the sounds of her movement. Listening, that silence, is also a mechanism of the gun. There is nowhere it does not hear you. Resting in your chamber. Staring at the ceiling. Dreaming that what happened will somehow stop happening.
The listener is always waiting for something to explode.
*
My mother sits on a queen-size bed, her left heel tucked underneath her, her bare knee jutting out from her body. The knee is pivotal. Pale as marble, it girds her body and absorbs the violent shudders that pass. My mother can make her body shudder at will. Any minute she will cave, her cream-and-peaches skin will collapse, the monster will show itself. All hell will break loose. Usually, she wracks her body in order to say that those present have caused her to retreat inside herself, where the damage is volcanic. No one can know this place—it is, perhaps, a performance that makes even my mother part of the audience. A way of disengaging, of speaking without the mouth. She forces her body to testify.
The first time it happened, I was away at college; my brother Dustin described it to me over the phone. There’d been a family fight, one of those drawn-out arguments that exceeded as much in decorum as it did the midnight hour. At 3 a.m., my mother had Had Enough. She went stone quiet, letting her cigarette burn itself out in the ashtray on her lap. Then my mother rose, the full ashtray falling from her lap, darkening the midsection of her nightgown. She walked slowly, dazed, down the hall to my bedroom. There, she lay down on my bed and began to shake violently, even as her body went rigid. She also started whisper-repeating the word “hands.” Dustin describes her face frozen, her eyes wide, her hands in fists at her side. She wouldn’t say anything else, and when her eyes finally showed recognition, the argument was a distant memory.
We knew whose hands she was talking about. One night, as a girl, my mother woke from sleep because she could not breathe. Her father’s lips pressed down on hers. The shaking always means, Now you’re molesting me. My mother has gone rigid and volcanic in the cereal aisle at the grocery store, at our local For Eyes Vision Center, and at countless restaurants throughout my childhood.
Now, however, my mother is alone in the smaller of the two bedrooms, sitting on that queen-size bed. The room is crowded by a small writing desk (which nearly buckles under the outmoded printer and computer, vestiges of my parents’ capsized courier business), a tall dresser, two slim bookshelves, and the bed. The wall has been sullied, and so it seems as if my mother has sprouted dull wings.
The gun violates the room. It threatens the vases full of fake purple flowers and cheaply-framed photographs of my mother’s mother, Gran, whose gleaming smile shines out from the bedside table, which she shares with the latest Sylvia Browne titles, books on communicating with the dead called something like Past Lives and How to Change Them. If my mother isn’t reading up on the afterlife, she’s wasting valuable Nielsen points on John Edwards’ smarmy show, Crossing Over. My mother is the kind of woman who stays on hold for guest psychics on call-in radio programs, asking about my grandmother, asking how she died.
The gun is, in fact, my grandmother’s: a pearl-handled .22 that my mother swept up while my other aunts argued over jewelry and second-rate china after Gran died. Now the gun is under her faded yellow sweatshirt, its mouth pressed against my mother’s breast. My father is knocking at the door. My brother is watching outside the window. My mother is saying, over and over, “I just want to go and see my mom.”
*
“She always called, Larry. Things would get bad between her and Pa, but she’d always call us kids and say goodbye.” My mother’s hushed voice barely reaches over Madonna’s voice, straining for a note high in her range, on the radio. My mother doesn’t want to draw attention to their conversation from me or my brothers, who are still arguing over who called the back seat in the shiny black and silver van. The van is new-to-us. I like to pretend the vehicle is not someone’s cast off, second-hand clunker, but is instead a space-age rocket, equipped with swiveling chairs and a miniature icebox where Pepsi chills in blue-silver cans. I like its large size, its carpeted floorboard, mainly because it camouflages the tell-tale sounds of my creeping toward the cockpit. I crouched there while my parents talked. Instead of the usual gossip about binge-drinking and bankrupt neighbors, my mother and my father are talking about my grandmother’s suicide.
I had never seen Gran angry, never heard her say a cross word. She was witty and smart, and, like most eccentric people, indulged other peoples’ own quirks and oddities. She never got upset when her mother-in-law, Grandma Hawkins, stole her jewelry and wore it around town, proclaiming this opal trinket or that ruby ring had been gifted her by an admiring beaux. I think Gran was amused by Grandma Hawkins’ sticky fingers, and her amusement only grew when she could flesh out these stories to check-out clerks, bank tellers, and fast food cashiers in their small Indiana town. Gran was the kind of woman who played along. Even when, on visits to our house in DeLand, my brother would run an afternoon “school” with my aunts and her as students; even when he insisted on being called “Miss Pat” and patrolled the schoolroom with a yardstick. I couldn’t reconcile Gran, the woman who even at fifty was castrating her own bulls, the woman who smoked until diagnosed with lung cancer, and not a day after that—I couldn’t reconcile that woman with the one who, according to police, had shot herself.
I know other details too: Pa, my mother’s father, found Gran dead in the hospital bed she’d slept in, in the living room. Pa told people he was so distraught upon finding her that he ran outside and tore apart one of the bushes before calling the police. I know Pa was having an affair with a woman named Mentora. Gran’s life-insurance policy named him a small-fortune beneficiary. I know Gran’s glasses were off and folded on a table, and she never took those glasses off, not even to sleep. Gran’s temple was bruised purple, and there were small, thumb-sized bruises around her wrists. She pulled the trigger with The Wrong Hand. But no one took any fingerprints. No autopsy was ever performed.
My mother keeps saying, “I know he did it. He did it, or he hired someone to do it. She talked about killing herself, but she’d never actually do it. She’d call us kids and say goodbye, but she never actually did it.” My father nods quietly, raising the volume a bit on the radio.
My mother shakes a cup filled with shaved ice into her mouth and grinds the chips down. Her jaw makes a slight popping sound, a muscular music which accompanies her mind’s reworking of the case. “The bruises, the wrong hand, the money. He did it.”
I am ten years old. From my vantage point behind my dad’s seat, my mother’s words shatter everything I’ve felt about my family before. We are a shimmering untrustworthy horde; I am a meddlesome child learning to blame his blood.
Later that week, we drive the three days to Indiana in the same van. We arrive just after a late March snow has blanketed the ground white. The Best Western in Brownstown does not live up to its name. The room has three dead cockroaches, a fact I beg to leave my head as I help unpack the van. In all, it takes five of us three trips to unload the van. We’ve packed for a week. During those three trips back and forth to the car, I notice someone has built a snowman in the center of the hotel courtyard, near a defunct fountain. The snowman’s arms have fallen off, his head is misshaped, melted by the afternoon glow. I’m staring at the deformed shape, stilled by its awful powerlessness. I haven’t prayed in so long; I count to 100 by twos, then threes when it’s time to say them at night. And so I am surprised when I find myself asking God, out loud and with all my heart, to give my grandfather A.I.D.S.
*
I tell too many stories at once. This, too, is a violence. I want to tell you everything. I want you to trust my unflinching eye. Anyway, no story goes from left to right: narratives are like those monitors hooked up to trace the heartbeat: spiking, unstable. Now we’ve plateaued. Either the story continues, either I’m playing the part of the unwilling savior, or my mother dies.
*
I answer the phone in a rush. My mother on the other end says, “I’m calling to say goodbye.”
I don’t know what to do. I think, She’s kidding. I am a senior in college, rushing out of my dorm room, nearly late for a quiz in Contemporary Women’s Poetry.
My mother puts the phone down to pour out what sounds like a thousand little stones smacking against her porcelain sink. Her voice is unwavering as she counts, out loud, by threes.
“I just want to go and see my Mom,” my mother says. I say, “Take a deep breath” and “Just keep talking to me” and “Oh my god.” I am stunned and stalling for time, trying to find the words a boy uses to save his mother.
I keep talking until Dustin comes home from school to find her with the pills and a loaded revolver on her bed. He calls my father, who rushes home early from work.
I failed the quiz.
*
After my mother tried to kill herself, again, in the apartment we shared in Houston, Dustin and I decided on something radical: we asked our mother to leave. She said, “I’ll be out tomorrow.”
My mother leaves two months later. During that time, she and my father go out for most of the day and come home with scads of boxes. They begin to line the kitchen counters. The pressure cooker peeks over the top of one open box, surrounded by guarding-soldier spatulas. My mother enters the kitchen, throws a plastic utensil into the box, glares and sniffles in my direction, retreats to her room. I have not yet decided which headline I’ll become: Woman Raises Ingrate Son or Boy Struggles Free From Chaos.
*
A week after asking my mother to leave, she makes me her confidante again. She takes a break from packing up the contents of our antique hutch. At first, our talk is guarded. We are on separate sides of invisible barbed wire. I stand on the other side of the stairs, while my mother lights up. Her face is partially concealed by the steel bars of the railing which ascends to the second floor and beyond. The more we talk, the more comfortable we get. She offers me a cigarette out of habit, a gesture that recognizes we once were friends. She can’t decide where she’ll go. As she talks, I group her impending moving-day options.
My mother has had affairs in the past; just before moving to Houston, she’d lived with another man in Jacksonville. The affair (number four if you must know) soured when the man, whom she’d met in a Yahoo chat room, told my mother he wanted to get breast implants. My mother has met another man online, some computer programmer who lives in Dallas. Option 1 consists of leaving my father and living with either of these online lovers.
Option 2: My mother says that if she decides to stay with my dad, then they’ll drive off together. My Aunt Karen has promised them the use of her un-rented trailer in Heltonville, Indiana, where they could make A New Start. This would be New Start # 4.
If not, my mother says, then lets her voice trail off. Instead, she fishes a dog-eared copy of Final Exit from her impossibly huge leather purse and tosses it at me. She says she and my father will drive their rust-stained Miata out to the middle of nowhere one night when my brother and I are asleep. She says she’ll watch my father shoot himself, then take the gun and commit suicide too. “Won’t you be happy as a pig in shit then,” she says.
The sentence starts out as a taunt, but turns serious. She barks out “pig in shit” as our upstairs neighbor, a quiet Asian woman, starts descending the steps. The woman’s eyes fly open, darting back and forth between me and my mother. My mother, embarrassed, turns away, crossing her arms across her chest and drawing hard on her cigarette. When our neighbor’s about to get in her car, she yells back at us, “You the pig!” Her finger jabs at us as she slams her car door shut.
*
People try to die. You know a girl, a friend of your brother’s, who tried to drown herself in the kitchen sink, her hand heavy on the back of her head until she was soaked to the shoes. You know the girl who brought a gun to school and put it in her mouth and pulled the trigger in front of her Spanish class, but couldn’t figure out how to take the safety off. You know the jokes people have made about these girls. You’ve repeated those jokes, desperate to make your friends laugh. You never wondered what these girls were drowning under, what they were trying to kill in themselves.
After you see your mother holding a gun to her temple, you think what needs to be erased in her is you. When you take the gun from her, when you feel its cool metal stark in your hands, the thought of putting it in your mouth, of pulling the trigger, is a half-second plague in your mind. You feel sick. You feel powerful. It’s so utterly alien. It bleeds out of any memory you have—it happened, it will happen, it’s overhappening right this second.
*
When I tell people the story of my mother trying to die, I call her Little Susie Suicide. My name objectifies her, makes her a doll with a cord attached to her broken back. One swift pull, and Susie swipes a jagged steak knife at her wrist or chucks a fistful of doll-pills down her cloth-lined trachea. With each attempt to die, I find it harder to reconcile Susie Suicide with the rest of her identities:
1. Next-of-Kin. Outside St. Luke Hospital’s ICU Neuro, where my father has survived a heart attack and then an interhemispheric stroke, my mother explains: “It was either commit adultery or commit suicide.” Jesse has flown her back to Houston, only six months after she left. At night, as my comatose father breathes with the help of a machine, she holds his hand and sings to him. The sweetness of her voice is intoxicating. I could listen to her all night long.
2. Murderous Savior. Dustin tells my mother he’s gay two weeks before his seventeenth birthday, in early November of 1994. Two weeks later, she’s waiting for Dustin to come home from school, her gun on her lap. The note she’s written says she’d rather Dustin die quickly from love than slowly from A.I.D.S. Dustin is, of course, still a virgin.
3. Adult Advisor, Broward Gay and Lesbian Youth Group. After months of therapy, my mother drives Dustin to his first meeting at the Group, which meets every Thursday night. He’s too nervous to go in by himself, so she comes in with him. Before long, Dustin is elected the Group’s secretary, and our mother is providing comfort to fifty young adults every week, some of whom have been kicked out and abused by their parents. Thursdays, my mother taxis members to and from Group, buys dinner for the kids whose parents have kicked them out. Most members call her Mom.
4. Dislocated Debtor. Once, when Bank of America called and asked for Marsha Hall, my mother replied in her most secretarial voice, “I’m sorry, I’m not in right now.”
5. Crossing Guard. When a particularly vocal band of field hands start haranguing her every day, my mother blacked out her front teeth with an eyebrow pencil. She waited for them to go by, anxious for their catcalls to reach a crescendo. That’s when she smiled real big. The tongues all stopped, mid-trill. Their faces quickened from the slap of her unbeauty.
6. The most beautiful woman in the world.
*
Suicide Attempt 4 took place in Fort Lauderdale and was preceded by a long argument in the middle of the night. Finally, one of us kids said The Wrong Thing. Our mom shot up out of her bed. “I’ll just go get hit by a car,” she yelled back at us. She slammed the front door so hard the windows in her bedroom shook.
Yes, way out west in unincorporated Fort Lauderdale, where we barely had paved streets, five minutes from the Everglades, my Mother was going to stand in traffic. I couldn’t help picturing her hours-long wait on the dark median on Bonaventure Boulevard. I pictured her, killing time while waiting for the Mack truck, drawing her own chalk outline on the asphalt.
My mother wore a polyester nightie to go stand in traffic. It was powder-blue, and at 3 a.m., our tiny neighborhood was dark. She was a pearly banshee, hoping for a semi to run her over. Our neighbors’ sprinklers were timed to go off at this small hour of the night; their routine conserved water but left the sidewalk slimy, activating the black mould. She marched out into the night, and when her bare feet hit that mould, she went down hard on her ass, her nightgown flipping up. She remained sitting, stunned. When she tried to get up, she fell again. Again and again, my mother could not gain her footing. She finally resorted to rolling over on her side into the grass. Dustin, who was running after her, had to turn away so she wouldn’t see him laugh.
Terror won’t exist without comedy in the story of how my mother tries to die.
*
I am home from college, Spring Break of my senior year. It’s been six months since the time she called me in my dorm. I am in my mother’s bedroom, trying to apologize after an argument. My mother hasn’t showered for days. She is smoking a cigarette while I apologize. I’m on my dad’s side of the bed when I put a hand under his pillow. She lunges at me, and rips the paper out of my grasp. But I’ve already read enough of the opening lines —can’t, enough, sleeping, see my mother— to know she’s overdosed on her Tylenol PM.
I talk her into the bathroom. I don’t know how I do it; I am not focusing on what I’m saying, but rather on the tone. I talk smoothly, slowing down the emergency, keeping the ambulance at bay. I feel like a professional, some expert called in to talk down the jumper who’s taken to the skyscraper’s ledge. Here I am, in my mother’s bathroom, holding back her hair in a greasy ponytail while she kneels by the commode, her finger down her throat.
“Oh god, they’re white.” I don’t respond. “They’re white,” she says again, hissing out the word, looking up at me. Her eyes swim, clear and blue, in the wide shock of her face. My mother does not want to die.
*
One failure erases six successes; one bullet, one bottle of pills, one step out into the busy thoroughfare eradicates all those years you loved someone. You don’t survive this. Not in one piece.
*
The last time we spoke, my mother threatened herself again. She sat in a chair in the long-term care wing of the Houston V.A. Hospital, where my father was receiving physical and occupational therapy after heart and brain surgeries. My father sputtered and sobbed in the background. I’d never heard him cry like that before. The sound he made was like a huge bird trying to raise into anvil-heavy air.
My mother said, “I bet you’re just as happy as a pig in shit.” She had decided to go back to Dallas, back to the programmer. He’d be there to collect her in the morning. She called to ask if I’d come see her off.
A month before, we stood under a clear sky astonished by the vast number of stars. My father was in a different institution then, a sort of half-way house between St. Luke’s and the V.A. Around us, a whole medical center complex hummed with red lights and all-night visitors. As she smoked her mentholated cigarette, I turned to her. I said, “I want to be a family again.” It wasn’t easy to say this, and I am still not sure I meant what I said. I wanted to want it, though; I wanted to erase the months we didn’t talk, when I’d hand my dad the phone and say, “Your wife’s calling.”
My mother said, “I’d like that too.”
Now that she’s leaving him again, I’m fed up. I have begun the conversation in neutral tones, trying not to upset Susie Suicide. But our conversation deteriorates. She begins comparing her adultery to my sexuality, reminding me of the Gay Pride Parade floats she rode on, the clubs she took me to, the years she was fifty gay kids’ Mom.
My Squadron of Acerbic Slurs jets out and fires their barbed missiles before I can even think of recalling them. I am red-faced, screaming into the phone so loud my boyfriend comes into the room, knowing things have gotten atomic. I jerk away from him, screaming into the phone, “Go fuck yourself,” and slam the phone down on the receiver. I pick it up again, knowing the call is disconnected, and slam it down even harder.
My boyfriend holds me to him, soothing me, talking me down too. I take ten minutes and call again. My father answers crying. “Your mother’s going to kill herself, and I can’t get up.” My father’s body is tangled in a nest of I.V. and heart-monitor and catheter tubes. My mouth dries up like cotton. “She’s going to take the pills and go to a courtesy room and—” my father’s voice breaks off.
My mother, in the background: “I’ll be dead as a doornail before they find me, my corpse will be rotting.” Then she grabs the phone. “I bet you’re happy as a pig in shit.”
The professional I’ve become retains an even tone in his voice. I advance the hypothesis that it would most likely take more than eight hours for a corpse to rot. I remind her how frequently those courtesy rooms are cleaned, then rotated to new people. I suggest she might be found rather quickly, before any kind of decay has had any real head-start. She slams the phone down on me.
I will never be my mother’s savior again.
*
My father’s voice on the answering machine is slurred. He talks that way almost always now, the vowels running into each other like blind ice-skaters in warm-up. There’s a crispness, too—it takes him so long to say each word, he has to fight for every syllable. He’s living with my mother again, in a town called Heltonville, a tiny rural community in Indiana, in that trailer that Aunt Karen promised them so many years ago.
My father’s voice on the answering machine is upset. “Can you guys give me a call? It’s an emergency.” The emergencies have been, over the past few weeks: my uncle refusing to return my father’s calls, a vandalized car that was probably the handiwork of some teenagers, and, then, a real one: my mother took pills as my father watched. Thirty sleeping pills.
When he tells me this, there’s a voice inside me talking down a long corridor. It says, This will end. You won’t get to say goodbye.
But it ends like the rest, only without my being there, enveloped in the terror, counting the pills as they slip out of her throat and into the toilet. It ends with the ambulance and the police. It ends with my mother in the back of a squad car; it ends on the fifth floor of a hospital; it ends hundreds of miles away, an emergency curdled into a tired and predictable sadness.
Or, it never ends, not really. It just moves somewhere else, takes up residence in the place between my heart and my stomach, stuck in the silence between the ribs. I keep my mother in me. I keep her so she can never die.
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