FIFTEEN by Deborah A. Lott
When my grandmother died, my father went crazy. And I felt pulled to follow each of them.
When my grandmother Rebecca first noticed that something was wrong, she tried to treat herself with Vaseline. It was her all-purpose miracle ointment: she stuck it up her nose with a Q-tip to get the dried “boogies” out; she rubbed it into her hands each night and slept with them encased in white cotton gloves. Vazeline, she called it, as if it had a z in it instead of an s. So she put globs of it in her rectum every time she saw blood in the toilet, every time she felt a stab of pain. Bigger and bigger globs of it to try to staunch the bleeding.
That’s how my father told me the story afterwards, his mouth pressed too close to my ear, the details of the story accounted too viscerally, so that I felt trapped there in Rebecca’s bathroom with her, the remedy, like my father’s words, going not into her, but injected straight into me.
This time, the Vaseline failed to perform its miracles. That place where my grandmother had been putting it was a place that she could not see herself, and so she did not want anyone else looking at it either. It was the place where that dirty, toxic substance came out, and the blood was one more shameful effluent confirming the body’s corruption. When she finally allowed the doctor to put his clean, shiny scope up her, she was blooming with cancer.
“She’ll need to see a surgeon,” he told my father, who had been pacing the waiting room, sighing and pulling with his deformed hands at his thick black curls, “but it’s probably too late.”
* * *
My first cousin Steven and I were sitting on the covered lawn swing on the grounds of the Glendale hospital where we had been consigned for “some fresh air.” Inside, the surgeons worked on my grandmother. Steven was the son of my uncle Nathan, my grandmother’s second son, my father’s charming, less tormented brother. My father always said that his mother favored Nate because his physical beauty constituted proof that something good could come out of her body. My father also had a handsome face, but he had been born with deformed arms, one leg two inches shorter than the other, and misshapen blobby excuses for fingers, two on one pincer-like hand and three on the other. According to my father, my grandmother interpreted his defects as God’s punishment for her having had “a moment’s pleasure” at his conception.
Steven was fair-haired, blue-eyed and good-natured like his father; I was dark, intense and anxiety-ridden like mine. Steven and I were best friends. He was six months older, fourteen to my thirteen. For as long as I could remember, we had been whispering, giggling, sharing secrets.
If my father had had his way, I would not have been on the swing, I would have been at his side, taking it all in – the anguish in the atmosphere, the surgeon’s pronouncement that my grandmother’s condition was hopeless, the sobbing that ensued. It made my father nervous if I was not with him, and when he was already nervous, my absence only made him more nervous. Although his anxiety often spread through me like a contagion, I believed his hypervigilance protected me from the still greater dangers of the outside world. But for once my mother and my aunt Sophie had prevailed, and they sheltered me like a child.
The grounds of the hospital were well-manicured with roped-off gardens of roses. The swing we sat on was ancient, its floral chambray faded from the sun and covered with leaves and tree pollen. Steven was using his pent-up energy to keep us in motion, one foot, clad in its usual black Ked, pushing us off from the ground every time our momentum flagged. The swing’s rusty chains squeaked as we swung onto a big rolling lawn; birds sung and a sprinkler twisted somewhere in the distance.
I felt nervous, a strand of hair in the side of my mouth, my shoulders hunched, my arms held in defensively so they would not come into contact with the bird droppings splattered on the swing’s splintered armrests. My father said bird droppings carried “avian germs.” The shedding wood also posed risks: if a splinter punctured my flesh, even if the splinter were tiny and the wound it made practically invisible, and even though he’d subjected me to a near overdose of booster shots, I could still get tetanus and die. Remembering my father’s warning, I opened and closed my jaw to reassure myself of my lockjaw-free state.
Steven talked fast, chattered without breaks from one sentence to the next, the pitch of his voice getting higher and higher as he grew more excited. He was always trying to persuade me of something, of the way things were, which was the way that Steven saw them. He scarcely paused to see if I agreed; as long as he kept talking, periodically poking my upper arm for emphasis, he assumed he was getting somewhere.
Steven was making up rules for the games we would play later, elaborate tournaments of Chinese checkers, marathons of Monopoly. I half listened. The bad news that I anticipated about my grandmother hung over me like my own doom. Of course, the queasy certainty that something catastrophic was about to happen hung over my family all the time. I can see now that it emanated from my father, who, despite all my mother’s efforts to calm him, suffered from sky-high anxiety, hypochondria, multitudinous phobias, and a tendency to extreme and ever-shifting moods. Perhaps he, in turn, had contracted a sense of dread from his mother, who regarded the world, the body, and the joys of both with great suspicion. Whatever its origins, at age thirteen, that family dread fully inhabited me.
If I lost the games, Steven was saying, I would have to pull down my pants and show him my genitals. Steven and I had played variants of these diversions on and off for years: kissing, touching, showing games. I always lost, and it never occurred to me until years later that maybe these games were rigged.
When younger, Steven and I had spent hours practicing kissing. Always a perfectionist, when Steven attempted a new roller-skating maneuver, he’d practice it over and over again, imploring, “Don’t take your eyes off me. Did my ankle turn too soon? No, you didn’t watch close enough. Watch me again.” On a Sunday afternoon, in my grandmother’s pristine bedroom, while the rest of the family congregated in the living room, Steven employed this same persistence in duplicating a kiss he’d seen Tony Curtis deliver in a movie. Again and again, he put me in his arms, bent us halfway over, and planted his chapped lips on my closed mouth.
“Let’s try once more, my mouth was too tight,” Steven said, wiping his lips on his madras sport shirt’s short sleeve, and starting over. As fond as I was of Steven, I never liked the taste of his mouth. His sinuses chronically plugged from allergy, his mouth possessed that yeasty, closed-in odor of someone with a cold.
By the time of my grandmother’s diagnosis, we had stopped kissing, but Steven’s showing games had endured and become more baroque: I had to dance in a circle naked; I had to dance in a circle naked with a feather in my hair; I had to dance in a circle naked with a feather in my hair singing tra la la. I didn’t mind the games, I liked to perform, and Steven had always been appreciative of my displays. But we were getting older now, and our conversation was adding to my unease: we should not be talking about this while Grandma was in surgery.
“I’m worried about Grandma,” I said. “I’m scared of what’s going to happen.” I made room in my mouth for my fingers alongside the strand of hair and proceeded to bite my nails. Steven inherited his father’s optimism. “Oh, cousin,” he said, “que será, será.” He had heard Doris Day sing the song in a movie.
I felt guilt followed by a nauseating wave of superstition. If God were listening, if those evil energies that hung over my family were capable of hearing, what we said could affect Grandma’s surgery. We should be saying something nice about her, something very very nice. We should behave like good little Jewish grandchildren who had never seen each other naked. My grandmother always said that God would punish her if she failed to keep Orthodox Jewish law, and implied none too subtly that He would punish us if we did not obey her. The reverse must also be true: if we were good then God would reward us by not letting Grandma die.
I prodded Steven and he began to reminisce about the giant bags of M&M’s and chocolate-covered orange sticks that Grandma bought for us when we came to visit. His voice trailed off wistfully at the end, as if we had eaten those M&M’s eons before, as if Rebecca were already dead. Bringing candy into the house constituted a major concession on my grandmother’s part: she not only kept strictly kosher but renounced any interest in food. She sustained herself on canned peaches, the medically obligatory prunes, cream of wheat, a sludgy grain drink called Postum. The mainstay of her diet consisted of cold boiled chicken that she made every Friday afternoon and ate all week, down to the last stringy, slimy shred. The candy was the only thing in my grandmother’s house that Steven and I considered edible.
Affecting nostalgia, Steven said, “Remember those old-fashioned sayings Grandma told us? Beans, beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot. I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.” He laughed and nudged my arm. These sayings were as close to jokes as anything my grandmother had ever imparted. She tended to be sourly prescriptive, always advising us to calm down and “shah still before somebody gets hurt.”
“I remember,” I said.
* * *
The surgeons removed my grandmother’s colon and rectum but the cancer had invaded other organs. When my father learned that she had only months to live, he became frantic, prowling the kitchen table at which the rest of our family was seated, like a caged tiger looking for meat. He screamed, cursed, lamented, his voice booming, his black eyes boring into each of us, looking for something – someone to blame. It was the family practitioner’s fault for not finding the cancer sooner; it was the surgeon’s fault for not being more aggressive; it was my brother Bob’s fault for not visiting her more often. It was my mother’s fault – for everything.
“How could she keep this bleeding secret? Couldn’t you see how much weight she was losing?”
From rage, he moved into frenzied rumination, then self-recrimination, then back to rage, all the while in motion, twirling his curls with his pincer hand, dripping with sweat. Finally, he looked up to the ceiling and, in his most stentorian tones, found a target large enough to encompass his accusations: “God, what did my Mama ever do to deserve this?”
Then came scheming and planning.
“What do these hick doctors know? We’ll take Mama to the Mayo brothers.”
“Gor,” my mother said, shaking her head and enunciating each syllable, “there’s nothing anyone can do.”
“Don’t be a patsy. The rich people get all those experimental treatments.”
“You’ll only prolong her agony.”
“Gordon,” Uncle Nate said, when my father got him on the phone at midnight, “you keep trying to fight nature. Sometimes you have to let go.”
“Nobody loves Mama the way I do,” he said.
* * *
Even before the cancer, my grandmother’s mind had been going. One Friday afternoon, she forgot to tear the toilet paper in advance of Shabbos. Orthodox Jewish law decreed that on the Sabbath, one must not tear; to tear was to work and all work was prohibited. In advance of each Sabbath, my grandmother left an ample stack of neatly folded squares of toilet paper on top of the tank. But this day, she called my father on the phone, whimpering. “I was on the pot and had nothing to wipe with.” My mother went and tore the paper.
Another day at sundown, she heard noises in the back bedroom, the room she would not pay to light or heat, the closed-up one Steven and I were afraid to go into. On its walls reigned bronze-framed, sepia-toned portraits of her dead parents, their expressions severe. Rebecca ventured into the room to investigate the noises and discovered her parents, who had been dead for thirty years, come to visit. All dressed up and sitting on the bed, looking as they had when she was a young woman still living at home.
“I’ve missed you, Tata,” she exclaimed. “Why has it been so long?” Rebecca felt safer and more content than she had for fifty years. They insisted she go with them and she did not hesitate. When she returned to the room after getting her sealskin coat from the mothball-infused living room closet (she needed a coat since the three of them would be going back to Detroit), they had vanished. She remembered then that they were dead, and grieved as if her grief were brand new.
* * *
The surgery left my grandmother with a colostomy bag. “The doctors removed her rectum,” my mother told me. I could not fathom it. How do you remove a hole? The rectum seemed synonymous with the crack in the buttocks to me – did they stitch the crack up tight with a band of stitches like my mother used to stitch up the Thanksgiving turkey? What did my grandmother feel inside when she bore down – a gutted vacancy?
My grandmother could not fathom it either.
“It’s been days since I’ve had a BM,” she fretted.
“Ma, it’s okay,” my mother said. “Remember I told you everything comes out higher up, everything comes into the bag. That’s what they irrigate the bag for.”
“What bag?” she said.
Every day home health aides came to flush the stoma. Colonic irrigation. I imagined my grandmother taking a bath in a tub full of her own feces, surrounded by the bad stuff she had worked so hard for so long to rid herself of. One day she called hysterical, afraid to let the unfamiliar aides at her door in to do their job.
“They have to irrigate your bag,” my mother said.
“What bag?” my grandmother said.
When Rebecca became too ill to take care of herself, my father and Uncle Nate moved her to a kosher nursing home in the Fairfax District. Steven and his family visited every Sunday afternoon. But even though my father set out to see his mother every weekend, even though we all got dressed up as though we were going, he would procrastinate until it was too late to make the one-hour trip. In the interim between visits, he could pretend that Rebecca was getting better, that she had gained some weight or taken a walk. Confronted with the sight of her, shrunken to eighty pounds on her 4’11” frame, he could not maintain the delusion.
“Oh my God, she’s so gray,” my father said. “The color of cancer. The Malech-hamovess is hovering over her.”
Nor could he tolerate the rest home with its germs and bad odors. Trapped in the car on the way there, he would fantasize about going to a “fancy restaurant” afterwards to indulge his always gargantuan appetite. “What – you need a reward,” my mother chastised him, “to spend time with your dying mother?”
At the hospital, my father forced his body between my grandmother and me. “What do doctors know?” he said. “Cancer may very well be contagious.” Whenever we left, my grandmother offered presents: her tortoiseshell comb, her jeweled pillbox. My father confiscated them – what if they harbored cancer germs?
Only at the very end did my father tell my grandmother what she was suffering from, only at the end did he use the word cancer.
“Ich vais,” she said, jerking her hand at the wrist as if she were swatting away a fly. “I know, Gor, Vus maynstu, ich bin a nar? What, do you think I'm an idiot?”
On New Year's Eve day, the hospital called to say that my grandmother had pneumonia and would die. My father pleaded for antibiotics, IVs, anything to forestall the inevitable.
“Please don't let her go. Don't let my Mama die,” my father begged the doctor.
“Pneumonia is an old lady’s best friend,” the doctor said, already old and worn out himself. “She’s not fighting it. Don’t you.”
That night, most of the family congregated at the bedside. Steven and I stayed home. With my nineteen-year-old brother Bob in the next room, Steven and I blew up balloons, and took out noisemakers. The confluence of events confused us: were we supposed to be celebrating New Year's Eve or waiting solemnly for my grandmother to die? The pending loss felt abstract; we reached inside for the grief we’d seen our parents display but could not find it. So we tried to sit quietly on the sofa holding hands.
Then Steven had a great idea: I should let him put his hand down my pants, to feel my pubic hair. Looking was one thing, I thought, weren't we too old to be touching? And should we be doing this while Grandma lay dying? Something bad would happen if we tempted God. My father repeatedly cautioned us when he saw us holding hands and giggling, “Your children will be idiots.” But he’d often qualify his warning, in the cultivated tones of a liberal professor lecturing a hall of impressionable freshmen. “Of course, throughout most of human history, marrying a cousin would be considered ordinary. If we were members of royalty, no one would bat an eye.”
My brother Bob would look at us and smirk, “Incest is best.”
Steven was persuasive. In turn, we crept our hands down each other's pants. First, I pulled my hand out when I felt the demarcating line of his pubic hair. On my second foray I went farther but stopped when I felt the place where his penis began, squeamish to ascertain its full dimension. Ever the bold explorer, Steven stroked the tip of his finger across my clitoris.
Something wet is coming out of me,” I said. “You must have hurt me.”
“No, cousin,” he said, “it’s normal, you’re just developing.”
Steven explained matter-of-factly that my vagina was lubricating to enable a penis to enter more smoothly. “For intercourse,” he said. Horrified, I realized that Steven was right. Here was final, climactic proof: This was not play; it was sex. Why didn’t my body know that I wasn’t ready to have sex, least of all with my cousin Steven? And how could this be happening while my grandmother lay dying?
* * *
God punished me by making my grandmother die just after the turn of the New Year. In order to meet the strictures of Orthodox Jewish law, she would have to be buried on January 2nd, my fourteenth birthday. This seemed ominously significant. While my parents went to the mortuary to arrange for the funeral, I stared at the one faded postcard photograph we had of my grandmother as a child. Except for her nose being sharper and her face more angular, she looked just like me. We were both short; we both had bulging stomachs and suffered from perennial colitis. I was her. She was me. And she was dead.
At the end of the chapel service, they opened Rebecca’s coffin. While everyone filed past, I planned to avert my eyes and rush out the side door. I had never seen anyone dead and I didn’t want to start with my grandmother. But Steven, sitting next to me, nudged me forward. He was too curious not to look and he didn’t want to look alone.
“You’ll never forgive yourself,” he urged, “if you don’t tell Grandma good-bye.”
Laid out in a white-satin-lined coffin, Rebecca wore a white gown, a veil and white-satin eyeshades over her eyes. “They’re to protect her from being blinded by the glorious light of God,” my father told me later. She looked like a bride; no one had warned me she would be dressed for a wedding. Under the veil, her face was powdered and waxen. I knew immediately she was dead because her expression was emptied of all its characteristic reticence, her lips curled up in an unambivalent smile and coated with something glossy – was it – Vaseline?
I didn’t know what it meant for a person to be dead, this dead, so dead, so remarkably altered. Other. So other. She had been like me, she looked like me, and now she had become this thing – and I understood in a sick, visceral rush that if I kept growing up, someday I would turn into a thing like this, too.
“Doesn’t she look peaceful?” Steven asked. I wanted to scream and slug him. No, she doesn’t look peaceful, I thought. She doesn’t look like any state possessed by any living being. Can’t you see? She’s dead. Her cheeks rouged pink and stuffed with something round. My grandmother did not favor rouge.
On my birthday.
My brain leapt to an instantaneous conclusion: My grandmother looked like a bride; funerals were like weddings; to get married; to grow up, to have sex, was to die. Everything was leading to this final, intolerable outcome. I had to stop this snowballing sequence of events from happening to me. No, no, no, I thought, I will never wear a wedding gown. I will never have sex. I will remove myself from the terrifying cycle of life and death.
And yet, a moment later, out on the cemetery grounds, I was entranced by the way my first high heels clicked across the gravestones. Those were my legs in stockings, and my feet, looking like a woman’s feet, in my shiny new black-patent-leather pumps.
“Don’t walk on those – there’s dead people under there,” my brother Bob said, yanking me by the elbow off the gravestones.
We were standing outside the chapel, waiting to walk behind the hearse to the graveside, when my father began to howl. For a moment, we weren’t even sure where this unearthly sound was coming from. When I peered back into the sanctuary, there was my father, his face ghostly white, as white as my dead grandmother’s. He was bent over the corpse, keening, producing a blood-curdling, animal’s wail. My mother struggled to hold him up, and pull him away, so that the rabbi could close the coffin.
On the way home in the car, Steven tried to be suitably tragic: “Why she had to go I don’t know she wouldn’t say . . . Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, now it looks as though they’re here to stay . . . ” We had recently discovered the Beatles.
* * *
In the following days, weeks, and ultimately months, my father refused to reconcile himself to the fact of his mother’s death. He could not carry on without her, he said, he would not live without her. Every day he survived her, he said, widened the distance between them. Unconsciousness was the closest he could get to death, so he fought to stay under with Seconal and Percodan. Like me, my father wanted to stop time or at least pull himself out of the rush of it. So he went on strike against it by refusing to engage in his usual daily activities. He stopped showering, getting dressed, or shaving.
My mother explained my father’s behavior to me. “Several times in your father’s life, he’s had breakdowns, and his mother pulled him out. Her will against his. Rebecca was the reason your father was able to make a living and have children. His life could have gone other ways.”
My father also halted all semblance of work, scarcely venturing into the back bedroom that served as the home office for our family insurance agency. If he didn’t get back to work soon, my mother said, the family would not survive financially. He was the licensed agent, the salesman, glad-hander, front person, jokester in English – and Yiddish – depending on the audience. My mother hovered in the background, revved my father up, churned out reams of paperwork, rescued again and again the crucial but illegible notes he scrawled on scraps of paper and then scattered.
The insurance business was one milieu where my father’s catastrophizing paid off. His sensationalistic depictions of earthquakes, winds, floods, and thievery in the night sold policies. And when it came time to convince the companies to honor his clients’ claims, my father’s college days as a Socialist crusader made him an eloquent advocate.
“C’mon, Gor,” my mother said. She’d been sitting in the office since 8:00 a.m. It was now 11:30 and my father was hesitating at the threshold of the room, dressed in the same flannel nightshirt he’d worn for days, bits of egg yolk from at least a week’s worth of breakfasts encrusted down the front of it, crumbs stuck in his coarse black beard. “You’ll feel better if you get cleaned up and come back to work.”/
Always vain, my father liked elegant clothes, and when his mood was up, he often dressed for the workday in a starched white shirt, suspenders, and a flamboyant tie. Of course, he might be barefoot and never get around to putting trousers on over his underwear, but like the newscaster whose bottom half remains hidden by the desk, my father’s top half would be impeccable.
My mother sat in her steno chair, in the middle of the room, where the opened venetian blinds let in the most possible light. Her hair pinned back a little more severely than usual, dressed in a crisp shirtwaist dress, wearing a fresh coat of bright red lipstick, my mother had armored herself to get my father back to business. She was trying to place her will where Rebecca’s had been.
Poised in my mother’s lap was a large cordovan-colored leather-bound book labeled “C through D,” one volume of her ten alphabetically organized accounting ledgers. In between pleading with my father, her lips moved as she performed subaudible mathematical calculations, registering the numbers in the book in her clear longhand.
“C’mon, Gor,” she said. “You’ve got to get your mind on something else. Rebecca would want you to take care of your family.”
At the mention of his mother’s name, my father advanced into the room and began to circle my mother’s chair, his black eyes blazing. “What would Rebecca want? If I hadn’t listened to you, Rebecca would still be here to tell me.”
My father sat down on the torn leather couch, and picked up one of the three separate telephones he kept in his office. Although he could have had three lines installed on one phone, he preferred the substantiality of three separate instruments, and the excitement of all three ringing at once. “He likes tumel,” my mother said. Noise, confusion, arousal, to match the chaos of his inner state. With one phone on the desk, another strewn across the room on the floor, the third in his hand, my father would conduct his own version of a conference call, three receivers at his head, my mother following after as he paced, trying futilely to untangle the forty-foot-long cords before he tripped on them. They had to be long enough to stretch across the hall and into the other bedroom so my father could become prone whenever the need struck him, which might be as often as every fifteen minutes throughout the day.
My father dialed a number. The same number he called over and over again. He listened as the phone at the other end rang one, two, three times and then the click of a tape recording came on and a woman’s voice nasally declared, “You have reached a disconnected number.” It was Rebecca’s old phone number. When he heard the tape, his face contorted in disbelief. He flung the receiver down without hanging it up, the harsh recorded tones continuing to echo into the air.
“I can’t believe it,” he sobbed. “No, no, no, my Mama can’t really be gone.” He exited the office and crawled back into bed.
* * *
Nights, I listened from my bed as my father paced the uncovered wooden floors of our house, from one end to the other and back. Whatever part of the scene I could not see, I conjured in my head. The two-inch disparity in length between my father’s legs caused him to limp badly when he did not wear his built-up shoe. When he walked, the floors creaked with the uneven cadence of his step. First a loud creak, then a slight groan, a beat, and then another lighter creak.
My father went into the kitchen, turned on the lights, turned them off, then on again. Opened the refrigerator, closed it. Cast open each of the kitchen cupboards in turn and rifled through them. What was he looking for? Food, painkillers, sleeping pills, anything to quell his agitation. He picked up a bottle of bourbon; I heard the cap ring as it fell and twirled on the tile counter. He took a swig right out of the bottle, swallowed hard, and then groaned.
From the kitchen my father went into the living room, and turned on lights that lit up the hallway and threw shadows into my room. I sat up in bed and watched him. He adjusted the thermostat so that the furnace flared up full blast, and then stood, in his nightgown, over the blue flame, his muttering echoing through the metal grate. Just when it grew so hot in my room that I had to throw off my pink chenille bedspread, he turned the thermostat down.
He approached the front door, parted the drapes roughly over the paned window and turned on the porch light. Giant moths and dragonflies swarmed around the sudden illumination. He gripped the nubby green drapes in his hands, peered out between them into the night. Then he began to talk to his mother. “Oh, Mama,” he wailed. “How could I have put you in the cold ground?” He sobbed. Heaving, exaggerated stage sobs. My mother had trained us to think of my father’s emotional outbursts as histrionics, mere performances. In fact, my father often seemed to regard them this way himself. Pausing in the middle of a display with self-consciousness, he might stop to take a reading of the audience’s reaction, or wink at me as if to acknowledge my being in on the act. But in the wake of my grandmother’s death, my father lost the comic distance that had always saved him.
Who was he performing for now? I wondered. Not for me. He couldn’t have known that I was watching. Framed in the soft light of the living room, my father railed out into the dark night, talking to no one, talking to his dead mother, talking to God.
My father wasn’t the only one in our house preoccupied with Rebecca’s death. I wasn’t sitting up in bed just so that I could watch my father; I was sitting up in bed because I was afraid to lie down and close my eyes. Every time I did, I saw that last image of my grandmother in her casket. There she was in her white veil, and under it, her strangely waxen, powdered skin. I lingered on her unnatural smile, and then the terrible moment when they dropped her coffin into the ground. My grandmother loathed dirt; she was forever sweeping it out of her house, giving herself enemas to purge it from her body, following the rules of Kasruth to banish it from her food, and despite all her efforts, she had wound up buried under it. And, as instructed by the rabbi, I’d contributed, by throwing shovelfuls onto her myself. Now I followed her coffin into the ground and wondered if the mud had seeped onto her white dress, if the bugs were eating her flesh, if her flesh had already rotted off her bones. And could she hear my father crying?
“I can’t get Grandma’s dead body out of my mind,” I told my mother one morning. “I’m afraid she’s haunting me.”
“Don’t be morbid,” my mother said.
On other nights, I’d find myself startled from sleep by a flashlight shining in my face, my father’s rotund body bending over me, his face so close that I could not escape his sour breath. “Baby, Baby, Baby. Are you all right? I needed to make sure you were still breathing.”
Steven’s family made an easier adjustment. Just as they had converted their Sunday afternoon visits to my grandmother’s house to visits to the convalescent hospital, they now converted those visits to cemetery outings. They left flowers at her grave, read the neighboring tombstones, and went to a drive-in movie afterward. Uncle Nate joked that a scraggly stray cat that had shown up on their doorstep was my grandmother reincarnated. “She’s a hisser just like Becky,” he said.
When they proposed a visit to our house, my father made excuses. He still blamed Uncle Nate for thwarting his efforts to seek more aggressive care for my grandmother. I talked to Steven on the phone nearly every day. He understood without my saying so that something had changed the night my grandmother died, and that our days of sex play were over. Sex continued to be a major topic of conversation, though. Now we schemed to find more appropriate objects. He would introduce me to a boy from his Jewish youth group; I would find him a girl; maybe the four of us could go out to a movie or ice skating.
* * *
My father’s wish to freeze time went unanswered. Despite himself, his grief mutated and assumed new forms. Hypochondria, whose vague symptoms had always provided a kind of background noise for my father’s life, transmogrified into full-blown obsession, an agitated preoccupation with every sensation that came with being alive. It hurt to breathe, pee, walk. My father felt nauseous, dizzy, “on fire.” “Reverse peristalsis” threatened the forward momentum of his digestion. If for months my father had cried out repeatedly that all he wanted was to die and be reunited with his mother, the prospect of God fulfilling that request terrified him. Since his mother had died of cancer, he must have it too. He went on an odyssey from medical specialist to specialist who subjected him to multiple tests and found nothing seriously wrong with him. The doctors’ reassurances could not dispel his conviction that he was dying. How could he believe them against the more compelling evidence of his own body? He could feel tumors growing in his colon, in his bladder, cells dividing furiously in his brain. When he shut his eyes, he could see them. Finally he settled on one locus for obsession: the lower-right side of his abdomen, and never took his hand off it.
At the end of the school year, my English class read Shakespeare. Why didn’t I ask Daddy to help me with my homework, my mother suggested. My father was at his best giving a speech, reading aloud. We’d begun when I was four with Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. I sat beside him on the edge of my bed as he sang out the lines in a spontaneously acquired upper-class British accent, his voice resonating to the last seat in the balcony. “In winter I get up at night / And dress by yellow candlelight. / In summer, quite the other way, / I have to go to bed by day.” Then he reminisced about the dreary winter mornings of his Detroit childhood and the icy floors in his mother’s house. “My mother hated to pay for heat,” he said. In the mornings, in half-darkness, he’d have to run in his heavy underwear from his bed to the bathroom down the hall. “Those mornings were so diminishing,” he said.
My father never talked to me as if I were a child and he an adult. He spoke to me as if I were another adult, or more accurately as if we were both simultaneously child and adult. Whatever we were, we were in it together, bound by our special nature. For, according to my father, he and I weren’t like other prosaic people, my mother, for example. We were poets like Robert Louis Stevenson, artists, sensitive souls made for a better world than the one we found ourselves in, the one my mother kept trying to force us to live in.
I brought my homework into the living room, sat on the sofa, and began to read Romeo and Juliet aloud. This captured my father’s attention enough to get him to settle in next to me. He was wearing Jockey shorts with the leg holes stretched out so that his floppy testicles peeked out the side of the pouch. I tried not to look even as I could not look away, drawn to and repelled from looking at my father’s too-invasive eyes, at his overripe and overexposed body, at his hands whose appearance seemed odder and more disturbing the older I became, and, at his casually exhibited genitals.
“Help me read my Shakespeare, Daddy,” I said. “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” Distracted, my father inserted his hand into the waistband of his Jockey shorts and massaged a two-inch area on the lower-right side of his abdomen. Massaged is probably not the right word exactly – demonically, relentlessly, and yet somehow unconsciously, he dug his fingernails into his flesh until he had bored a red hole in the skin. As blood started to ooze out of the wound, my mother shouted at him, “For God’s sakes, leave yourself be, Gor.”
“I’m not doing anything,” he said calmly. “Can’t you see it’s the parasites?” The more insane the content of my father’s words, the more elevated and refined his presentation.
“What parasites, Daddy?” I said.
“You’re encouraging him,” my mother said.
My father got up from the sofa and returned with the oversized magnifying glass he used to read the fine print on insurance policies. He stood before my mother, thrusting his massive belly too close to her, and attempted to hand her the glass.
“Look, you can see them crawling,” he said.
“You keep finding new ways to break my heart,” my mother said, turning her back on him.
My father walked over and held the glass out to me. I could not turn away from my father. I put my Shakespeare down and took the magnifying glass from his hand. I moved my head in closer to survey the area of tortured skin. This close proximity to my father’s round abdomen still signified a certain homey, comic comfort. I looked in his face for the familiar indications that what we were doing was something of a game, a private performance that would bind us closer even as it drove my mother away. Yes, it might be a little crazy, and yes, there was always the risk that we might go too far, and the situation grow too frightening, but it still felt good to be in it together.
My father’s eyes reflected only resigned panic. I moved the glass in close and then farther away to get oriented. I squinted my eyes. Before me the forest of curly black hairs that blanketed my father’s fat belly. In between the hairs wove a pattern of red and blue lines, bumps, scratches, and a trickle of darker red blood. If there was something perverse, something grotesque about this encounter, there was also something so . . . intimate.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see, Daddy,” I said.
“See that black spot,” my father said. “That’s the head of the paramecium.” He said it with tremendous clinical authority. I looked closely, there was a speck of black. Maybe a hair follicle, maybe a birthmark, maybe just dirt. But, as always, the power of my imagination rose to the level of my father’s conviction: I saw the paramecium. It looked almost the way it had under the microscope in my eighth-grade science class.
“I can feel them burrowing around inside,” he said. “You believe me, Baby, don’t you?” I knew that paramecia didn’t burrow, but, as with any religious faith, my belief did not depend on reason. I made the leap once more and instantaneously parasites crawled not only on my father’s flesh, but on my flesh as well. I felt them. First just an itchiness on the surface of my skin under the waistband of my pants, and then a more insistent gnawing, the deeper pressure of their burrowing.
“Daddy, they’re on me too,” I said.
“Gotynu, there are no paramecia, there are no parasites, there are no worms on anyone,” my mother said, shouting and ripping the glass out of my hand. “What makes you so suggestible to your father’s mishegos?”
She glared at me for having once more engaged in some illicit oedipal collusion. “Just stop it,” she said. “Both of you, stop it right now.” And then, turning to him, she said, “You’ve done this all to yourself.”
He looked at her with the condescension of an enlightened being considering some lower order of mortal. “Don’t you see? I’m only digging at my skin to allow the parasites a portal of escape.”
“Vayismere, your mother would be ashamed of you,” my mother said, walking away.
“I’ve got to do my homework now, Daddy,” I said.
* * *
The unwelcome image of my grandmother in her grave began to invade my daylight hours. I devised a ritual to banish it: I had to mentally walk through the rooms of her house. The rule was that I had to walk through each room, recalling and renaming every object in it. The act served as a form of denial: if my grandmother’s house was intact, maybe she wasn’t really dead. If nothing were forgotten, nothing would be truly lost. It also served as penance. When my grandmother’s house was sold, my uncle Nate asked if I wanted anything to remember her by. I was afraid that I might catch death by touching her things, and what if they were haunted? Now I felt guilty. My dead grandmother had to be as insulted by my rejection as she’d been when I refused to eat her chicken. The only way to make amends was to pay constant homage to her pristine house and possessions.
So, in my head, I would traverse the 1300 square feet of her 1924 house over and over again: Open the cherrywood front door. Close it and remember the crystal glass knob. Enter the living room; remember the maroon patterned Indian carpet. Walk over to the round mahogany table with its scary claw and ball feet. Pull on the gold ring in the mouth of the lion’s head to open the drawer. Look inside. There, inside the drawer, just like always: her canasta cards with their faded pink rose design. Walk across the room, remember the polished hardwood floors, and the mantel with the pictures of all the grandchildren. Go to the glass closet; pull on its doors, and feel that little catch at the end as they open. Ah, the nauseating whiff of mothballs. Stroke the soft black sealskin fur of her coat. Grandma’s beautiful coat. Now go into the kitchen with the black and red signet patterned linoleum. Turn the painted handle so that the ironing board comes out of the wall; don’t forget the old-fashioned toaster with the folding sides and the wire frames for the bread. Now you’re in the dining room: stand on your tiptoes so you can peer beyond the rim of the top shelf of the maple sideboard and see the little juice glasses with the set of multicolored, scalloped foam rubber coasters.
Down the hall to the bedroom of the sex games, and then that other bedroom, the one that smells of talcum powder and rancid toilet water. No, no, no, still too afraid to go in there.
I was convinced that my dead grandmother wanted me. “The dead envy the living,” my father said. They longed for reunion just as the living longed to be back with them. I had seen the power of that longing deform my father’s life – what could it do to a dead person? Horror movies had already shown me that being dead brought out the worst in people. My dead grandmother had to be possessed by all the worst traits she manifested in life: she was critical, puritanical, obsessed with cleanliness, unforgiving. She hated me for my youth, for my sloppiness, for my incipient sexuality. That bride-ghost-witch wanted to shah still me for good.
Rebecca came to me one afternoon while I took a nap. A nimbus of fire around her head, she floated behind my bed dressed in her white burial gown. Then she held up her hands, which glowed with an electrified yellow light. I understood her intention: she wanted to touch my mother first, to pass death on to my mother and then through my mother – whose tender touch I would not be able to resist – to me. I woke up screaming.
When my mother came running into the bedroom at the sound of my screams, I told her that Grandma’s ghost had come to get me, and she just shook her head.
“Does everyone in this family have to go crazy at once?” she said.
* * *
My father’s delusions took yet another turn. Hypochondria and paranoia converged: his doctors were no longer “missing the diagnosis” due to incompetence or stupidity; they were conspiring to kill him. “Doctors are very moralistic,” he told me. “They sense that I’ve been too much of a libertine.” To punish him, during their examinations, they injected his penis and rectum with foreign bodies. “Criminal!” he screamed, hanging up the phone on yet another of them who’d suggested that he was mentally ill.
My father told his tale from beginning to end to anyone who would listen, in an ever-expanding circle from family to friends to clients, and then insurance company executives. If the latter heard too much, they would shut the business down. “Your father’s going to put us on the street,” my mother said. She asked me to take him off her hands so she could work, and to keep him away from the phone. I would have to provide the audience for my father’s narratives. The one who did not know how to stop believing.
“It’s not just the doctors, you know,” he said late one afternoon. He leaned in close, seductively, conspiratorially. “Your mother and your Uncle Nate are in on it now – they’re plotting to do me in.” His words drew pictures in my head: my mother donning her rubber kitchen gloves and meting out a dose of the arsenic ant syrup that was so lethal she had to sign for it in the pharmacy, my uncle loading the gun he’d kept locked in the closet since World War II. My father’s rantings didn’t seem so impossible – hadn’t Shakespeare taught me that wives deceived husbands and rivalrous brothers plotted to kill brothers?
That night I served as my father’s spy. When my mother called Uncle Nate on the phone and spoke in a low voice so my father couldn’t hear from the next room, I stood at the closed door and strained my ears. My efforts at comprehension were foiled – I could only guess at my uncle’s side of the conversation and every time the discussion reached an emotional crescendo, my mother broke into Yiddish.
She was at her wit’s end, my mother said. My father was delusional. Addicted to sedatives. He would destroy the business. As soon as my Uncle Nate agreed that my father should be committed to a mental hospital, my mother backed down. He’d had breakdowns before and always pulled out of it. If only Rebecca had been there to save him.
My father was right: my mother and my uncle were conspiring. But weren’t they trying to help him? Wasn’t it insane to think otherwise?
“They’re just trying to help you, Daddy,” I reported back.
“Ah, don’t be naive,” he said. “They both want me dead.”
“Mommy loves you, Daddy.”
“Don’t kid yourself about love,” he said.
My espionage continued. I listened to my mother and Uncle Nate on the phone and wavered between reassuring myself that my father was wrong, and imagining exactly how my mother and uncle would carry out the plot if he were right. I could not quite believe that my mother and uncle were murderers but neither could I accept yet that my father was crazy. Either alternative placed the whole world in jeopardy.
Not long afterward, I was alone with my father in my parents’ bedroom, watching over him as he slept his stuporous, drug-induced sleep while my mother prepared dinner. Suddenly my father lurched from the bed and staggered to the window. I had been tired and bored, half asleep myself, but his sudden movement made my heart pound. “What is it, Daddy?” I said. My father screamed, pointing at something in the distance, and then started to claw at the blinds, shrieking a jungle bird’s high-pitched shriek. Outside, the light was just starting to fade on a destined-to-be-chilly winter night.
“You sons of bitches,” he snarled. “You goddamned sons of bitches.”
“Who are you screaming at, Daddy?” I asked.
“The henchmen,” he said, “the henchmen sent by your mother to kill me.”
I stood beside my father and looked up and down the street. I saw the shadow cast by a street lamp that had just come on. An overgrown pine tree swayed in the evening breeze, its top branches bent and sweeping at its own trunk. Several houses away a man picked up the afternoon newspaper and walked slowly across his lawn. A few dogs barked in the distance. That was all that was out there. I moved my gaze up and down the street again, and finally rested it on my father, where the trouble apparently lay. His eyes were open unnaturally wide, his pupils dilated, and sweat streamed down his face.
“You must still be dreaming, Daddy,” I said.
“They were here,” he said. “I saw them. Two seven-foot-tall goons. Don’t you believe me?”
What my father had perceived this time was not something microscopic like avian germs or open to interpretation like my uncle’s motives. This was not a paramecium harbored under the flesh. Not some dangerous process going on in his body or my body that no doctor or X-ray could disprove to me for certain. My father saw two seven-foot-tall henchmen standing at the window. My father saw something, no, my father hallucinated two people that he could not seduce even his most devoted, most suggestible daughter into seeing. I moved a few inches back from him and looked more closely at his face, still contorted in rage and horror. He saw something that wasn’t there and I didn’t. My father was nuts and maybe I didn’t have to be.
“There’s nobody out there, Daddy,” I said.
“I must have scared them away with my screaming.”
“You’re imagining things – ”
“Ah, get away from me, you’re just like the rest of them.”
Even now, so many years later, I hold onto this scene as if it represents the precise moment at which my father went crazy. As if there remains some comfort to be drawn from such a clear line of demarcation. For if there were no such moment, then I would have to accept yet again that the father I worshipped was, to some degree, crazy all along. That much of the reality I relied on as a child, much of my sense of the world and of other people, much of what I believed about my mother, even my grasp of my own body and its interior workings, were shaped by my father’s delusions, and that these delusions were never benign. That I made the mistake of aligning myself with the parent who was crazy because I confused his intensity with love.
If my father taught me one thing, it was to think in visceral terms, to picture in awful detail the dark, unreliable places in the body. That is how I imagine his insanity now, as tissue and blood. It resided in him, resided in our family, as cancer cells may survive in a person as long as their multiplication is kept in check. After my grandmother died, my father’s madness multiplied, and mutated, spread until it could not be re-contained. Unlike my grandmother’s cancer, my father’s disease was contagious. In the wake of my grandmother’s death, it traveled from him to his particularly susceptible daughter.
* * *
My father finally talked a young internist into admitting him into the hospital for another round of tests. He was ill, after all, by this time, having lost more than fifty pounds. When the doctor concluded that the problem was psychiatric, my father got dressed, packed his bag, and called my mother. “We’re going to Mayo. Maybe those doctors aren’t in on the conspiracy.”
My mother told my father she would come down to the hospital and get him. Instead, she met the doctor and signed committal papers. An orderly came and transferred my father from one floor of the hospital to another, from the medical wards to the locked mental health wing. That was how easy it was. My father was officially, certifiably crazy. I could stop believing him.
* * *
With my father out of the house and my mother in charge, events proceeded in a quiet, affectless, slow motion. My mother, who had always seemed stoic and held-in, now seemed denuded of all feeling. I feared that without my father in the house to protect me, my mother might exact revenge for my having always taken his side, for my having been too much like him, for that hot, charged connection between us. We were cautious around each other, careful. Whenever I started to talk about my ongoing fear of the dead, my mother stopped me. “I don’t have any patience left,” she said. My brother Bob offered to call in a psychic. “Maybe Grandma’s trying to send you a message from the grave,” he said. We ate meals without conversation; I talked on the phone to Steven. My mother spent nine or ten hours a day salvaging the business.
My father refused to engage in any form of psychotherapy; none of the anti-psychotic medications seemed to be working, so my mother agreed for him to receive a series of twelve shock treatments. It seemed a betrayal. I couldn’t face him so I didn’t go and visit him for weeks. About halfway through the treatments, my mother announced that my father was recovering and he kept asking to see me. Without the daily evidence of my father’s maniacal narratives to contradict her, my mother had already started to rehabilitate his image. He wasn’t crazy – not technically. He might have had a little breakdown, but mostly he was just upset over his mother’s death, and neurotic. Lovably neurotic, like always.
On a Saturday afternoon, my mother and I went to visit my father in the mental hospital. She advised me to act as if everything were fine, to give him a “pep talk.” My father met us in the dayroom, which had pale yellow walls. I was dressed up, in a pink full skirt and a white ruffled blouse. After the visit I was going to a boy-girl party given by a friend of Steven’s. I was going to meet a boy, Steven was sure of it. I was excited to be wearing lipstick and stockings and the black patent leather shoes that I’d worn to my grandmother’s funeral.
They had made my father shave. Without the beard that had covered his face for months, his pale skin hung. In the midst of conversation, his eyes filled up and his lip started to tremble as if he were on the brink of tears. Then as if he had forgotten what he was going to cry about, the crying was aborted and an incongruous smile appeared in its place. He seemed overly formal, shy almost, like a third grader at back-to-school night, showing off his institutional setting with some pride of ownership.
“Want some ice cream?” he asked. “We have ice cream here.” With great effort, he went to the small refrigerator and got three cardboard cups of vanilla ice cream, which he carried over, using his chin to support the stack of cartons in his shaking hands.
We sat at a metal utility table slightly shorter than normal adult table height. We ate the ice cream with wooden spoons. While my father ate, he made the squeaky grunting noises in the back of his throat that guinea pigs or possums make when cornered. The tears in my own throat made it hard to swallow. With my mother off to the ladies’ room and out of earshot, my father’s mood darkened. He grabbed my arm with amazing strength, and snarled into my hair, “Your mother’s letting them scramble my brains. If you’re still my daughter, you’ll get me out of here.” His rancor hung in the air like stale smoke.
“There’s nothing I can do, Daddy,” I said.
I did not let his eyes find my eyes.
* * *
On my fifteenth birthday, I asked my mother to take me to a psychiatrist. I was afraid that I was going crazy, I was afraid that my father’s insanity had already taken root too deeply. She took me to a man whose girth and charisma rivaled my father’s. He had a full white beard and a nearly cultlike following. “I tell it like it is,” he said with his heavy Brooklyn accent. “No bullshit here.” When I told him all about my dead grandmother’s wanting me, he wrapped his bearlike arms around me, and commanded me to stop telling myself crazy stories. “I can see you’re a girl who needs to tell stories,” he said. “But there are a lot nicer ones you can tell.”
Steven had been right about the party. I had met boys there, boys with beguiling smiles and soft voices. I slow danced with them, burying my face in their sweet, supple necks. The potency of my own desire for them made me forget all about death. If sex was a sure path to death, I thought, why did it feel like a way to live forever? Dancing with those boys infused me with the full power of my own life force, raised enough heat in me to pull me right out of my father’s orbit.
In the summer, they released him from the hospital. He couldn’t remember many of the events of the past year, but every paranoid delusion was intact. It turned out that the craziness was the most resilient part of him. Like cancer cells, the cells where my father’s mishegos lay would be the last to go.
On the way home, my mother stopped to get him a haircut. She directed the barber: Neat and trim. A minor betrayal – shorter than my father ever would have chosen. I grieved his beautiful black curls as they fell onto the linoleum. I pretended not to see how hard his hands shook under the white smock. But at the end he preened, and struck poses, his image in the mirrored wall across from him as vain as ever before.
Back in my parents’ bedroom, I kept my father company while my mother made lunch. He put his clothes back into the dresser, underwear and T-shirts sharp with the smell of bleach, folded by the hospital laundry and labeled with his name in big black letters. Then from the bag they began to emerge, what my father had made during that hour a day dedicated to what the hospital called occupational therapy. In school, we called it arts and crafts. The only thing concrete that my father had to show for his months in the mental hospital was ducks. Prefabricated ceramic ducks that my father had been instructed to paint and decorate. He took one after another out of his bag, lining them up across his dresser. A shooting-gallery row of ducks. Now I can imagine the museum card for the show of outsider art: “Ducks Numbered 1 to 12 by Gordon Lott, mental patient.”
On the first bird in the series, my father had painted the feathers a different color than the body, had pricked a dot of black over the indented circle that represented the bird’s eye. Once the shock treatments began, the ducks became identical, each painted in a monochrome: eyes, body, feathers, bill.
My father appraised them, then selected one bird as if it were different from all the others, as if it were special.
“Look what I made for you,” my father said, holding the duck out to me as if it were a precious artifact, a gift.
It was painted aqua blue: my father’s favorite color. My favorite color still. The color of tranquility.
“You keep it, Daddy,” I said.
Deborah A. Lott is the author of In Session (W. H. Freeman), and her essays have been published in Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Lear’s Magazine, and Psychology Today. Lott’s short childhood memoir, “Elephant Girl,” appeared in Gray Wolf Forum #5: Open Houses. Her essay, “Trains,” which appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, was cited as a notable essay of the year in The Best American Essays 2004.