Riding Fury Home Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE: MILLSTONE, NEW JERSEY

  Chapter 1. White Plains

  Chapter 2. Before She Left

  Chapter 3. Carrier Clinic

  Chapter 4. University Heights

  Chapter 5. Millstone

  Chapter 6. School Days

  Chapter 7. Atlantic City

  Chapter 8. Bellyache

  Chapter 9. Life with Dad

  Chapter 10. Sweetie

  Chapter 11. Mom Returns

  Chapter 12. Alone with Mom

  Chapter 13. Barbie

  Chapter 14. Undertow

  Chapter 15. Overdose

  Chapter 16. Riding Fury Home

  Chapter 17. Happy

  Chapter 18. Return

  Chapter 19. Perry Mason

  Chapter 20. Crossing the Demilitarized Zone

  Chapter 21. Hayride

  Chapter 22. Leaving Millstone

  Chapter 23. Englewood

  PART TWO: IDENTITY HOUSE

  Chapter 24. Iowa Nights

  Chapter 25. The Great Divide

  Chapter 26. Freedom School

  Chapter 27. By the Bay

  Chapter 28. Older Women’s Liberation

  Chapter 29. FBI

  Chapter 30. Icebox Canyon

  Chapter 31. Fire Escape

  Chapter 32. The Village

  Chapter 33. Immigrants

  Chapter 34. Mother Courage

  Chapter 35. Unlearning to Not Speak

  Chapter 36. Woman Share

  Chapter 37. Identity House

  Chapter 38. Promised Land

  Chapter 39. T-Bone

  Chapter 40. Wilderness

  Chapter 41. Leaving Clarke Street

  PART THREE: SINAI

  Chapter 42. Rheumatoid

  Chapter 43. Diagnosis

  Chapter 44. Intensive Care

  Chapter 45. Halcion Daze

  Chapter 46. Spreading

  Chapter 47. Devil’s Slide

  Chapter 48. Hospice

  Chapter 49. Submarine

  Chapter 50. Sinai

  Chapter 51. Shiva

  Chapter 52. Thermals

  Epilogue

  Reader’s Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Selected Titles from Seal Press

  Copyright Page

  For Dana—brilliant thinker,

  advocate for justice—my love always.

  “Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collection of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language—this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”

  —Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

  Until I was twenty five, my first name was Karen. Chana, my Hebrew name, in English is pronounced Hah-nah.

  PART ONE: MILLSTONE, NEW JERSEY

  Chapter 1. White Plains

  I WAS THE FIRST CHILD ever allowed to visit a patient at the private mental hospital where my mother was being treated. Before our first trip there, Dad said, “The doctors think your mother will get better if she can keep seeing you.”

  Visiting hours were on Sundays, so I had to drop out of Jewish Sunday school, which I had just begun six months earlier. Though I was seven, they had put me with the six-year-olds because I didn’t read any Hebrew. The odd-shaped letters blurred before my eyes, and I made no attempt to decipher them. But I loved the singing, humming along to the guttural language. On the easy songs, like “Hava Nagila,” I belted the words. After songs, we got to eat exotic treats: dates, figs, and rugelach—buttery spirals of dough with raisins and cinnamon.

  My father and I sang on the two-hour drive to the hospital, up the New Jersey Turnpike, over the Tappan Zee Bridge. He taught me his favorite: “I’ll build a bungalow, big enough for two, big enough for two my honey, big enough for two, and when we’re married, happy we’ll be, under the bamboo, under the bamboo tree.” Dad and I sang and sang: ballads, show tunes, and spirituals, as our old brown Hudson lumbered along.

  Going to see my mother who was not a mother. My need of her was frozen, clamped down against any thaw. But she needed me. Maybe if I loved her enough, my mother would heal.

  I REMEMBER THE GROUNDS, the front lawn an expanse of green with a curving drive. The visitors gathered outside the front entrance, waiting for the appointed hour. The gates were locked until then, and there was a quiet hush among us, the waiting families. Dad held my hand. In my imagination, the buildings are dark and gothic, hovering like some dragon ready to pounce.

  That first time—and every Sunday afterward—I met my mother at the foot of a stairwell. As she came down the stairs, I looked up at her face, puffy and sallow. She leaned over to hug me, and I reached up my arms, willing myself not to pull away, but I flinched a little. She took my hand and we ambled onto the back lawn, my father trailing behind. Mom moved slowly, and she stumbled now and then. We walked past the tennis courts. “Fancy schmancy, huh?” Mom said. Then she laughed, but it didn’t sound happy. I knew Mom tried to play. She told me that all the patients were on so many drugs that they missed a lot of balls.

  I always brought Happy, my favorite stuffed animal, with me. One day, Mom and I were sitting on some steps outdoors, when another patient came over. He leaned over and put his face close to mine. I could smell his foul breath. He pointed at Happy. “What a nice bunny!” Happy’s long, floppy ears must have misled him.

  “He’s not a bunny, he’s a dog!” I protested, in an outburst of anger that was taboo to express around my mother. She was sick, it was not her fault, and I knew I must not get angry at her.

  Mom put her hand on my back. “It’s okay, honey,” she said. The man scowled at me, turned abruptly, and stormed away.

  ONE TIME, MY FATHER had a meeting with my mother’s psychiatrist while I waited in the car. I watched him walk back, hands in his pockets, head down. He got in, sat behind the steering wheel, put his face in his hands, and wept. Then, finally, he said, “The doctor says your mother will never get well. He says she is incurable.” I looked down at my hands. Happy had dropped to the floor. Somewhere inside I knew I must not be doing a good enough job.

  On winter days the hospital gave my mother a pass, and we went into town. We always went to the movies. I remember seeing Peter Sellers in The Mouse That Roared, a zany film about a tiny country that invades America. In that dark cinema, I could enter another world and forget the bloated stranger called Mother who sat beside me.

  After the movies, we always went to a local steak house, and the three of us ordered the same thing: T-bone steak with french fries. How I lived for the dessert—parfait in a tall glass, layers of vanilla ice cream and frozen strawberries in syrup, gleaming red and white. I would spy the parfait on other diners’ tables, anticipating its soft, tart sweetness in my mouth.

  Chapter 2. Before She Left

  BEFORE SHE LEFT, MY MOTHER read to me. Hundreds and hundreds of my mother’s books lined the shelves of our living room in the house we’d moved into when I was five. Mom would pull the book of Greek myths down from the shelf. How I loved those stories: Arachne in the guise of a spider weaving her web, Icarus flying toward the sun until his wings melted. Sometimes, she would read me a paragraph in Latin. I loved the cadence of my mother’s voice, first the Latin—which seemed so foreign and mythic—and then her English translation.

  My mother sprinkled her speech with bits of other languages: the Yiddish primal cry of woe—Oy gevalt!Vay is mir!—delivered with a melodramatic wringing of hands; the German she had learned as a scienti
st; and her love, French. She had a French ditty that she often said to me, declaimed in a low alto with one hand fisted on her breastbone, one hand gesturing outward: “Je t’aime, je t’adore. Que veux tu?Depuis encore!!!” (She translated this for me as: “I love you. I adore you. What do you want? What more is there?”) Somehow, even at five, I understood this wasn’t about me, and wasn’t about my father, but was directed to some mysterious, unnamed person.

  My mother adored song: Opera was her first love, musicals second.When she played opera on the hi-fi, sometimes I felt like covering my ears, but after Mom took me to my first opera—Carmen, at New York’s City Center—I would sing along with her, “Toréador, en garde!Toréador! Toréador!” imagining myself a bullfighter in a fancy gold-and-red jacket and that funny hat, waving my cape—“Olé!”—as the bull charged.

  In the afternoons, I would come home from kindergarten, and then first grade, filled with stories of my day. I chattered to Mom over a snack, showed her whatever I’d created in class. Then, I got to pick out one of our musicals, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma, or South Pacific , sitting at the dining room table, crayoning in my coloring book. Together, Mom and I would croon: “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair and send him on his way.”

  All the words that were spoken, that my mother read and sang to me, left so many words unspoken. The silence of what was happening to her. The grief that was pulling her under. It wouldn’t be until I was twenty that she would tell me the secret of her anguish, a secret whose impact would shape both our lives.

  ONE DAY IN MAY OF 1958, just after my seventh birthday, my mother was gone. I didn’t know that while I was at school she had gone into the bathroom and held my father’s rifle to her head. I didn’t know she’d pulled the trigger, and that, by some fluke, the rifle had jammed. All I knew was that my mother had been taken from me.

  Years later, when I was an adult, my father told me about that day.

  “I was in the kitchen, home from work for lunch, when I heard the clank of metal hitting the floor and your mother yelling, ‘Shit! It didn’t work!’”

  My father ran to the hall outside the bathroom. My mother was no longer there, but his rifle lay on the floor. He knelt down and opened the gun. A round fell out. He picked it up and stared at where the firing pin had left a dent in the case.

  “I thought, Oh my God, she pulled the trigger! I put the rifle down and called out, ‘Gloria?’ She didn’t answer. But then I realized we were beyond talking now. I went to the phone and called her psychiatrist. ‘Take her to Carrier Clinic, Abe,’ he told me. ‘I’ll call ahead and arrange her admission.’”

  After that, my father took over storytelling. At night, he lay next to me in my bed, mesmerizing me with his made-up tales. There were no Greek myths, but I loved his stories, too. One was about a white butterfly who is lonely and longs for friendship. He sees a white fluttering shape far away in a distant field and is drawn toward it, searching and searching. After a long journey, he reaches the shape. Ah, it’s a lady butterfly. They fall in love and are both very happy.

  A few days after my mother left, Dad explained, “The doctors are fixing Mom. It’s her head, not her body, that is sick. She’s in a special hospital for people just like her, called a mental hospital.”

  I interrupted his discourse. “Dad, what’s ‘mental’ mean?”

  “It means how you think in your head. Understand?”

  I nodded, even though I didn’t really get it.

  “Anyway, the doctors are using electricity to cure her. It will help her. It will fix her head.”

  I stared at him, blinking hard, but said nothing.

  During the day, I tried to be very good and not complain. But sometimes I would wake in the night, crying, “Mommy, I want Mommy! Where’s Mommy? I want my mommy.” Dad would come to my bedroom and try to comfort me, but I would not be consoled.

  My mother came home two and a half years later, her New Jersey accent thickly slurred from psychiatric drugs, her eyes dark with desolation. The electroshock treatments had wiped out her knowledge of Yiddish, German, French, and Latin. She told me no stories, sang me no songs. And I had tucked away my daily stories, my longings and need of her, tucked it all far away into some wordless place.

  Chapter 3. Carrier Clinic

  BEFORE OUR FIRST VISIT to Carrier Clinic, Dad sat me down at the dining room table.

  “Do you remember what I told you about Mom’s treatments at the hospital? How the doctors are helping Mom by connecting her head to electricity?”

  I nodded, fidgeting. My hands picked at the woven place mat.

  My father paused, looked at me, and then away. He looked back and cleared his throat. “Sometimes after the electricity, people don’t remember things too well. It probably won’t happen, but when we go to see Mom today, she may not know who you are.”

  I stared at my father while what he had said seeped into my body. Then I leapt up and ran. “Karen!” I heard my father call after me, but I didn’t stop as I raced up the stairs and down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. I flung open their closet door and stood facing myself in their full-length mirror. Yes, there was my reflection. I looked into my eyes, amazed and puzzled; I was still there. But how can I be? How can I be here if Mom doesn’t know who I am?

  CARRIER CLINIC WAS A modern building, with double doors leading to long white corridors smelling of disinfectant. Dad held my hand as we walked down the hall, until we got to a room where Mom was waiting in a chair. I held back, grabbing onto Dad’s pants leg. Mom rose, and exclaimed, “My darling girl!” Dad’s hand was on my back, pushing me toward her. Mom enveloped me in a hug, but she smelled wrong; instead of her usual flowery scent of Chanel No. 5, she was sour with sweat and stale smoke.

  Mom always remembered who I was during those four months of her electroshock treatments. We weren’t allowed to bring anything for her, but sometimes I would show her pictures I had drawn in my first-grade class: a yellow sun shining gold rays between purple mountains, or a box house with a triangle roof, smoke spiraling from its chimney. “Wonderful, sweetheart, wonderful,” she praised me, but quietly, like she was very tired.

  On our visits, Mom, Dad, and I would go out onto the wide green front lawn and walk around the building. Out back, there were horses belonging to one of the doctors. The long wooden row of box stalls smelled sweetly of manure and hay. We walked along to the thumps of hooves against wood as the high-strung horses kicked the walls, until we found a horse to our liking, ears flicked forward in curiosity. Dad carried a bag of carrots he had brought from home. He handed me a carrot. I gingerly held it up to the big gnashing teeth, entranced by the huge face with deep brown eyes, the chestnut coat, the long thick neck, the gigantic musky animal-ness so close at hand.

  On one visit, Mom gave me a pin she had made in occupational therapy. It was a turtle, created out of a circle of alligator skin, with a round leather head that had two glass beads for eyes. Mom had glued a pin clasp to its underbelly. I wore it to school every day until one of its glass eyes fell off, and then I carefully stored it in my pink jewelry box.

  I have no memory of our goodbyes. Each visit must have ended in some kind of parting. Did Mom hug me so tight I could barely breathe? Or did she just let me go, waving a limp farewell?

  WHEN I WAS IN MY TWENTIES, my mother told me what Carrier Clinic had been like for her. After each electroshock treatment, when she had recovered enough to move her stiff and sore body down the hall to the pay phone, when she wasn’t so disoriented that she couldn’t remember the names of friends, my mother would call anyone she could think of—my father, her parents, her friends—and beg, “Please, my God, they’re killing me—you have to get me out of here!”

  The response was always the same: murmurs of sympathy, and “The doctors say you need to be there. This will help you in the long run. I’m sorry, Gloria.”

  My father recounted to me a time she called him between her weekly electroshocks. “Abe, Abe, get me out of here,” s
he pleaded. “I can’t bear this . . . please, PLEASE!”

  He tried to placate her. “Gloria, only the doctor can do that. But it will be all right, you’ll see.” Somewhere in the midst of speaking, he found he was talking to an empty phone. “Gloria . . . GLORIA . . . ?”

  “Mr. Wilson?” The voice of a male orderly came on the phone. “Your wife has climbed out the window of her room onto the roof. She says she will jump unless we agree not to give her any more treatments, but don’t worry. We’ll get her in. We’ll call you back.”

  In spite of her depression, in defiance of all that was bearing down on her, there were moments when my mother’s feistiness and leftist politics rallied. One time, my father was in the hospital administration office straightening out some insurance paperwork. He was startled when Gloria marched resolutely into the office. It was several days after her latest treatment, so she was at her pinnacle of alertness.

  “What are you doing here?” Abe asked.

  “Oh, hi, Abe, don’t have time to talk,” she replied. “I’m here to let these people know that the food is atrocious! If they don’t do something to improve it, I plan to organize the patients to demonstrate.”

  SOMETIME DURING THE SUMMER at Carrier Clinic, my mother discovered she was pregnant. She had come home on a weekend pass and been with my father. Years later, I’d learn that by then my parents’ sex life was practically nonexistent, so perhaps she reached for him in a desperate need of comfort, or maybe she hoped that if they connected sexually, he’d relent and help her get out. When the psychiatrists found out, they had a conference with my father and mother. The doctors were adamant: She was not competent, not in a state to have another child. My mother wanted that baby, but she went for the abortion, beaten. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where they dilated her and scraped her uterus. That summer, I lost my chance for a sister or brother.